When John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the prevailing wisdom held that the contrast between the experienced Joe Biden and the former small-town Alaska mayor would work in Biden’s favor. So far it has not. In fact many Democrats are asking, “Where’s Joe Biden?”
A sampling of newspaper, TV or blog coverage leads you to assume Biden has dropped off the end of the Earth. Vice Presidents are supposed to disappear, but that’s AFTER the election. Biden appears to have taken his cue early.
Biden’s disappearance has left Barack Obama alone trying to fend off the Republican attack dogs. The GOP strategy seems clear–assault Obama any time he opens his mouth so he must spend his energy on defense not offense. It’s hard enough for two people to cope with this, but for one it is almost impossible.
Joe Biden would be the perfect person to counter all the mudslinging. With his combination of a courtly manner and an “I’ve seen it all” history he could make some strong counter blows to the Republican negativism. But he has yet to do so.
Here is a trivia question for you: when was the last time you remember hearing about Joe Biden? Can you remember what he said and did? My guess is that the universal answer will be the Democratic Convention. But that was almost a month ago and since then Biden has gone AWOL. A Google News search for Joe Biden yielded the following startling reply:
No articles related to joe biden were found.
CNN attributes Biden’s disappearance to the press’ intensive interest in Palin, but Biden in part bears responsibility for the lack of attention. In the story CNN describes Biden’s situation as so pathetic that on one flight of Biden’s campaign aircraft there were only six reporters. An index released by the LexisNexis Analytics 2008 election dashboard showed:
Palin received nine times the media coverage that her counterpart did during the first week of September, which included the Republican National Convention.
CNN’s conclusion should not be heartening to Democrats:
the only surefire way Biden can make the news is to go directly after Palin — something he usually refuses to do. Instead, Biden peppers his stump speech with folksy sayings and anecdotes from the Biden clan.
“As my pop used to say,” he tells audiences daily, “it’s not how many times you get knocked down. It’s how quickly you get back up.”
He’s got two months to do that.
The International Herald Tribune was even less kind:
A day on the campaign trail without some cringe-inducing gaffe is a rare blessing.
Just this week, he mused that Senator Barack Obama might have been better off with Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate.
Speaking of AWOL there are two other Democrats who pledged to help Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have also disappeared from sight. Their lack of support for Obama lends even more credence to the impression they are going to let Obama stagger through this one alone so they can ride in and rescue the Party after Obama loses the election. First to go will be Howard Dean. Then the tumbrels will begin rolling up to the guillotine. Donna Brazille, off with her head. The rest of the Democratic national Committee, off with their heads.
Blogger Ben Smith stated the obvious on the anniversary of 9/11:
Here’s something that hasn’t happened yet this cycle: Bill Clinton doing a single public event for Barack Obama.
This week Barack Obama was reduced to pleading with Bill Clinton to help with the campaign, something Clinton must have devoured with considerable zest. The language in a Guardian story caught the mood well:
Barack Obama yesterday made a belated personal appeal to Bill Clinton for advice on how to fight back against a resurgent Republican presidential campaign.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton continues to give the PUMAs and other Hillary for McCain supporters a wide birth. She has yet to condemn any of them. After all, she will need them in 2012. Although she would be the perfect person to go after Sarah Palin, Clinton strangely has refused to do so:
She has drawn a line against making personal attacks on Palin, Clinton insiders said. She is happy to attack the Republicans on policy, but thinks it is a strategic mistake to engage in personal criticism of Palin.
With neither Clinton nor Biden challenging Palin, the job has been left to Obama staffers and the media itself. The person I called “the most dangerous woman in America” is essentially receiving a free ride courtesy of the Democratic Party. Comparisons with both the Kerry and Gore campaigns are inevitable. Their inability to go after the Counterrevolution’s basic assumptions doomed their campaigns and no one so blatantly represents those assumptions than Sarah Palin.
Right now Barack Obama’s situation eerily resembles the one that existed during the controversy over the Reverend Wright. Instead of coming to Obama’s defense, the big names in the Democratic Party remained silent. Now they are doing it again.
Here is a suggestion for the Obama camp. You need to book major television time or line up an interview in which you will take on negative campaigning just as you took on race. John McCain promised to run a clean campaign, but instead this contest is degenerating into a political version of an ultimate fighting cage match.
There are less than two months left in the election for Obama to remember his lost momentum. He needs to fight back but to do it in a way consistent with his personality. Think Karate Kid or Yoda, not Rocky.
As for the rest of the Democrats, they need to get off their rear ends or they will find themselves back in the minority or with a razor-thin majority to counter a President who has a lot of promises to keep. For two years I have written about the need for the Democratic Party to recover its roots. Now it just needs to show it is alive.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
