Like George W. Bush, Obama has been criticized for his lack of experience in national and international affairs. And like President Bush, Barack Obama has tapped for veep a man with all the right establishment credentials and connections, a man Ron Fournier of the Associated Press called “the ultimate insider.” According to Fournier, commenting on the Biden pick, “a senior Obama adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his boss has expressed impatience with what he calls a ‘reverence’ inside his campaign for his message of change and new politics. In other words, Obama is willing — even eager — to risk what got him this far if it gets him to the White House.”
Senator Joseph Biden is certainly a known quantity. A six-term veteran of the Senate who took office in 1973 at age 30, Biden has an established track record of extreme left-wing positions on a range of important issues. He favors re-instating the so-called “assault weapons ban” and closing the “gun show loophole” whereby firearms may be bought and sold amongst private individuals without a paper trail. Biden opposes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and is one of the most ardent climate-change alarmists on Capitol Hill. His rating in The New American’s “Freedom Index” for this Congress (to date) is a low 19 percent.
Not surprisingly, Senator Biden is a staunch supporter of the United Nations, of NATO, of NAFTA, and of most of the rest of the internationalist, “anyone-but-America-first” agenda. Senator Biden, as the elder George Bush did for Reagan and Dick Cheney has done for George W. Bush, will — if elected — no doubt mentor his president in the niceties of the establishment’s agenda, ensuring that, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, an Obama presidency will continue the most important policies of its predecessors.
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
