Sen. Obama will announce (and text) his choice for Vice President early this week. Whom will he pick? On this morning’s Meet the Press, Andrea Mitchell predicted it would be Sen. Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Biden’s prospects caught fire after Russia and Georgia squared off — triggering an international crisis. To showcase his team’s foreign-policy mettle, Obama recently dispatched Biden to Georgia.
To be sure, Biden has a penchant for verbal gaffes (one gem: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”). Nevertheless, no one can question Biden’s impeccable foreign-policy credentials.
Yet I do have concerns about Biden’s support for the credit-card industry. In 2005, Biden voted for a bill that, to Arianna Huffington, read “like a credit industry wish list”.
What did that bankruptcy “reform” bill do? It gutted the ability of working-class Americans to declare bankruptcy. As Jackson Williams explained on Huffington Post:
You see, it turns out the average income of folks who file bankruptcy in this country is less than $30K; not the Burt Reynolds’ type millionaires gigging the system that we all heard about when this bill was debated. Also, the vast majority of bankruptcy filers do so because of massive medical bills, a job layoff, or both.
Perhaps it’s understandable that Biden would be solicitous to credit-card outfits: most of them make their corporate home in his state of Delaware. Needless to say, it would strongly behoove Biden to clarify his position on true bankruptcy reform (Obama himself voted against the 2005 sham bankruptcy reform).
At a time when unemployment is steadily rising, we need a VP who will stand up for the common man.
– Gautam Dutta
Several factors against Senator Biden:
1)another Senator, 2) another long-winded cpeaker who is less interested in the audience understanding what he has to say than his saying it, 3) another Northerner, 4) another Washington DC fixture.
He may have the best credentials on foreign policy, but Senator Obama needs someone on the ticket with executive experience, business acumen and someone from the West or the South. The pideal person with all these characteristics is Governor Richardson. It is too bad that he has so little charisma and comes across as a total bureaucrat.
By Quan on August 17th, 2008