2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Should President Obama pick a new VP? [View all]shanen
(349 posts)Two times, if I remember correctly. Pretty sure Truman was his third.
It's obvious that only a few people agree with me, but I certainly haven't seen any reasons that convince me. When you mention "scandal", you actually reminded me of Agnew. No, I don't think that Biden is or has ever been a crook, and Agnew was a rotten little crook to the core and forever, but in some ways Biden's recent attacks have reminded me of some of Agnew's. In terms of campaigning, Agnew's main job was to be the angry attack dog that made Nixon (now reborn as Romney) look relatively gentle. Biden doesn't have the vicious core--but the neo-GOP is trying to portray him that way, for example in last weeks fake-flap about the "chains" as racist code.
I've already raised the health issue, at least for the campaign of 2016, in the basic fact of Biden's age.
The topic of a superior alternative is troublesome, especially when the target is Ryan (who was partly picked to target Biden)... Unfortunately, I agree with you that there is no obviously superior alternative candidate who has Ryan's number. I do think that Biden can handle Ryan in their debate, but I think Ryan's age and fanatical health may give him so much energy in the campaign... I can certainly see Faux creating another fake issue such as "And today Ryan did 6 more campaign appearances while Biden did only 2, with a total for the month of..." This is actually another place where the neo-GOP money advantage can be applied very effectively simply in terms of getting faster planes and more people working on schedule optimization.
However, what is scaring me now is that Romney has picked Ryan partly as a predictor of the future of the neo-GOP. It is a truly frightening prediction, but it might be an effective play in a political sense... Many moderates may dismiss Ryan the way they dismissed Quayle (and forget about Dubya) and thus think Romney looks relatively moderate, while the lunatic extremists will think Ryan is certainly young enough to run for president after Romney, but he may call the shots earlier, either because they recognize Romney's true extremism or believe he's weak and will be handled by Ryan the way the big dick Cheney managed little Dubya.
Vote Nixon/Goldwater 2012? Or should it be Nixon/Hoover or Nixon/Goldwater-Lite?