Obama – Biden?  Change?  Not So Much
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[col. writ. 9/23/08]  (c) ‘08

The choice of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as the Vice Presidential pick of Sen. Barack Obama (D.IL) and his presidential campaign challenges the central theme of the run, and suggests that the constant critique of inexperience is finding its target.

For, no other analysis makes sense.

Biden is a likable guy, but his past presidential runs have had all the oomph of a ham sandwich. He has been a Washington insider for several generations!

He hails from the tiny state of Delaware — with perhaps 3 electoral votes.  As a state that has been safely in the Democratic column since 1992, it brings Obama no more that he needs to corral the electoral votes required to prevail.

Also, Biden, for all of his vaunted foreign policy experience, voted for the Iraq, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  If Obama’s star has risen because of his anti-Iraq War rhetoric, how does it help to choose a neo liberal hawk as his number two?

More to the point, Biden doesn’t close Obama’s perilous Hillary-gap, that of white women amped about the opportunity to make history.  That’s why I wrongly suspected he’d select Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, to give added oomph to the campaign of change.

But, in opting for Biden, Obama chooses not too much change (or more change than many Americans are able to tolerate.

For Biden is as much a part of the Washington establishment as the Washington monument.

Biden is  a central character in the so-called Washington consensus, the brain trust that found Iraq war acceptable, that supported globalization, that lives off of the cream of corporate largess, while the average person lives a life of quiet desperation, in the hung for rent, for food, gas, for a better education.

Change has never seemed so much the same.

–(c) ‘08 maj