Is O/K a Double-Down? Degrees of slippery-ness and Bushness, 25 minutes I’ll not get back and other stuff

1) Time magazine has an interesting take on the democratic veep stakes. If, as conventional wisdom says right now, Tim Kaine and Joe Biden are the most likely candidates, then these two men offer sharp contrasts.

So, does he double down — or does he compensate?

Time sees Kaine as a “double down” – a man so like Obama that their combined weaknesses just intensify the lack of experience all around. Biden, the “compensator,” would help strengthen the ticket by being strong in Obama’s weak areas, but he is not an “outsider.” And Obama is all about the “outsider.”

However, Biden has said before he was not interested in the vp slot and feels he is better used in the Senate.

Read the rest ->

Senator Biden, a front-runner in the media VP stakes whose own bid for the Democratic nomination this year was short-lived, said on NBC television: “I am not interested in the vice presidency.”

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“Unlike most other people, I’m being straight with you. If asked, I will do it. I’ve made it clear I do not want to be asked,” said the Delaware senator, 65, whose birth state of Pennsylvania is a big prize in November’s election.

Biden said he would have to say yes because “am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, ‘No, I will not help you out like you want me to’? Of course I’ll say yes.”

So, Biden would be on board, but reluctantly. Perhaps not the vibe the Obama camp is looking for. And this is not news. So either the float of his name is to persuade him or to make it look like Kaine has some competition.

2) Slate has a piece discussing Obama’s ability to shrug off any damaging information.

You could call Obama the Teflon-coated candidate, but this would miss the fact that his slickness goes all the way to the core. What has gone unexplored until now is this: How did Barack Obama achieve superslipperiness without becoming greasy?

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Like Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama has constructed a professional résumé low on embarrassing material. In this regard, Obama’s lack of legislative accomplishment is a genuine achievement. They can’t hit you where they can’t find you, which is a gambit that worked for Roberts in his confirmation hearings. Separating the real Obama from the persona is probably impossible. . .

3) Slate did a piece last week about the post-world tour Obama that you shouldn’t miss. Apparently, Obama’s Bush-like aspects really came through to some reporters asking about the trip.

Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq was so presidential that at moments, he sounded like our current White House resident. When Karen Tumulty of Time asked Obama what he’d learned on his trip, he said, “It confirmed a lot of my beliefs.” Lara Logan of CBS asked him if he was ever in doubt that he could lead the country in war as commander in chief, and he answered, “Never.”

After seven and a half years of George Bush, we should pause when a man auditioning for president says that the facts confirmed his beliefs and that he’s never in doubt.
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Before Obama flew to Baghdad, I asked his top foreign-policy adviser, Susan Rice, what kinds of questions he’d asked of his advisers over the months to test whether his Iraq withdrawal plan still matched the realities on the ground in Iraq. Rice gave me no examples. And now that the trip is over, we have no better sense of how Sen. Obama thinks about Iraq. It’s not that I expect grand revelations. But Obama still holds the same policy views he did more than a year and a half ago, even though a lot has changed since then in Iraq, and a lot of those events appear to contradict his earlier views. We know that Obama hasn’t moved, but we don’t know, really, why that’s so.

The author goes on to discuss Obama’s views of the surge and how his predictions around that surge were so wrong.

Some people would say the vote on the surge was one of Obama’s most important as a senator. As Obama pointed out regularly during the Democratic primaries with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, both of whom voted to authorize the Iraq war, a person’s past vote tells you something about his or her judgment. Obama has talked a lot about the clarity of his judgment in opposing the Iraq war. He also once suggested that if he’d been forced to cast an actual vote for or against the Iraq war as a senator, his view might have been complicated. On the surge, we get a chance to watch Obama grapple with similar complexities in real time. Or, at least, we should.

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If Obama was wrong about the tactical gains that would be made by the new strategy and wrong about how the Iraqi political leaders would react, can his larger theory about how Iraqis will respond to a troop pullout remain intact? Perhaps, but he has the burden of explanation. Does he elide contradictions, claim they’re irrelevant, and generally spin? In his interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, he suggested that he’d always said the surge would decrease violence in Iraq. That’s not just spin. It’s not true.

The author ends comparing Obama’s certainty and unwillingness to re-evaluate his stance to Bush’s famous stubbornness. I’m not sure I agree with that. Obama has been distressingly able to change his position on any number of issues, to the point where no one knows just where he stands.

But the Obama campaign has framed Iraq as his signature issue. Although in no position whatsoever to cast a vote (he was not a part of the federal government at the time) on going to war, Obama has said over and over he opposed it – going so far as to film a “do-over” of a speech where he said he opposed the war.

The fact that the American public largely agrees that the war is unnecessary and wrong means Obama cannot back away from his other positions on that war. Doing so would expose the fact that he is as likely as anyone to overlook the complexities of our involvement and might not make the correct subsequent decisions. If he can keep voters’ minds on the fact that he was originally against the war, he might make them believe he will make correct decisions from here on out. No one can promise that.

4) Realclearpolitics has the Brian Williams interview with Obama mentioned above, although not in transcript form. (I prefer transcript so I don’t get distracted by the visuals.)

I decided to watch, on NQ readers’ behalf, without coffee, and noted a few items. Times are a little general, not exact.

Obama claims, at 2:26, that his world judgements will make us safer.

When asked about his judgment about the surge, at 4:05, he remains adamant that he was right.

And if we had followed his opinions about Iraq – around 5:22, we would not have spent money or lost lives.

Around 7:35 or so, Williams asks Obama about his discussions with General Petraeus. Obama says Petraeus was animated in talking about what he sees for Iraq, as was Obama. But Obama then says he expected that Petraeus would be focused when talking about what he needs in Iraq, but when Petraeus moves to command Central Command that might change.

That strikes me as very telling. Despite the seriousness of the topic, Obama expects Petraeus to change his position when he leaves Iraq. Now, if the general was in charge of expense accounts and was moving from being a traveling salesman to being a manager, I’d have no issue with that. But the notion that Petraeus might significantly change his positions on Iraq as he changes his job concerns me that Obama sees everything as relative, squishy and negotiable.

He also shows that while he expects subordinates to advocate for their needs, he, himself, will have to remain above the fray to make more over-arching decisions – probably on some cost-benefit basis the way a manager would.

This does remind me of Bush – the unwillingness to get down in the weeds to thoroughly understand an issue before dealing with it. Obama plans to delegate and to be the decider.

At about 9:38, he mentions the residual force to be left in Iraq. While this has not gotten much attention, I’m real curious about what this force will be, how big it will be and what it will do. It so reminds me of how Vietnam got started.

At 11:00 he says again that his judgement on “this set of issues” [Iraq] has been right.

At 17:30 Obama talks about drawing down contractors at same rate as troops – as if contractors only do dining halls.

Somewhere around 21:35 or so, Williams asks the burning question about whether Americans should be concerned about Budweiser being sold to Belgium and the Chrysler building being sold to Abu Dhabi.

Williams follows this up by saying at about 24:17:

“You’ve said on this trip that you’re probably able to fall asleep standing up. . . How often do you have to remind yourself that if you get this job you want it’s going to push you beyond the limits you thought you had.”

Obama answers by saying he has found his “fifth and sixth” gear and that he thinks the job needs energy and enthusiasm.

Watch it if you like. Having subjected myself to the 25 minute interview, I can’t say I recommend it.

5) The LA Times has a piece that says Obama met with some influential women to talk about, among other things, the treatment of HRC during the campaign. Unfortunately, the story pretty much stops there. It would be nice to hear what actually got said.

6) Dick Morris discusses this “women problem” Obama has.

The problem is that older women don’t like Obama as much as younger women do. While 70 percent of women under 40 have a favorable opinion of the Democratic candidate, only 58 percent of women in their 40s feel the same way, and only 52 percent of those over 50 see him favorably.

For a Democrat to be losing among women over 40 is without precedent in the past 20 years.
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But a bigger problem may be a cultural alienation older white women feel toward Obama. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright may linger as a worry in their increasingly gray heads as they contemplate an Obama presidency. This fear of the unknown and the gap they seem to feel with Obama is so strong that it is overcoming their normal proclivity to back Democrats.

Well, duh. OK. Fine. But consider the source. It’s entertaining, but I wouldn’t put much stock in it.

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