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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (21441)	8/28/2008 3:50:07 PM
From: pompsander	Respond to of 25737

Vice Precedent The sins of the parties have been visited on their nominees. By James Poulos, August 26, 2008 Indeed — as Team Obama knows all too well — the Clintons may be at the end of their psychological rope, but they remain wily, and probably deathless, political opponents, with an arsenal of depleted-uranium loyalists. Bush, by contrast, is at the end of his political tether. His lieutenants have retired in droves, and he has never been an sophisticated ideological operator. He is a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters. And unlike the man he hounded out of the 2000 primaries, Bush would never select Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. He was wise, as a nearly Obama-fresh candidate in 2000, to pick Cheney. (He was not as wise to do so again in 2004.) But just as the mess left by the Clintons has become Obama’s responsibility to resolve, Bush’s dubious gift to McCain is a rat’s nest of truculent factions. The two most powerful of these are the ‘movement’ conservatives, spearheaded by National Review and the Heritage Foundation, and the neoconservatives, fronted by The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, each of whom are battling to remain the last establishment standing in the wake of Bush 43. Via their respective media organs, their vice-presidential preferences are well-known and well-advertised. Mitt Romney is the darling of National Review, and Joe Lieberman is the resident Harry Truman of The Weekly Standard’s long-running Truman show. The contest seems evenly matched. To the untrained eye, McCain might choose his pick of the litter and triumph regardless. He has dropped enough hints to prove that, when in the mood, he is willing to swing either of both ways. But if true, this is also misleading. McCain does not want Lieberman for the reasons the neoconservatives want him to want him. Selecting Romney would be a begrudging act of enforced normalcy for John McCain; selecting Lieberman would be like Cheney selecting Scalia to join him on a four-year safari through the world’s best-stocked nature preserves. John wants Joe in order to flout ideology; Joe’s neoconservative boosters want him in order to flaunt it. If McCain picks Lieberman, he will be unable to do so for his own reasons, and his campaign will become a contraption set to mangle him at the wheel. He will be sucked from the seat of Maverickdom into the sausage-grinder of a Movement. But Romney is no Biden. During the primaries, he glommed far too flagrantly onto the body of Bush. So McCain needs his own Biden, yes. But in this case his the Biden he needs is actually the inverse of Biden — a younger, not older, touchpoint between the GOP era before Bush and the as-yet unwritten era after. This person could be plucked from the private sector. But such a move will smack of a tacit admission that the Republican benches this year are all but emptied out. That may not be such a bad thing for an institution whose spring cleaning is long overdue. But when Bobby Jindal is wisely ripening in local office and Sarah Palin still shines in Alaska as a perfect example of everything Republicans have been and can be, McCain’s right choice seems clear. With Biden, Obama has staged the sort of coup necessary to begin to redeem the Democratic Party on its own terms. Your move, Maverick.