Joseph Biden is Barack Obama’s Vice-Presidential pick. Hold the excitement. Biden will supposedly provide foreign policy “experience” and gravitas to Obama’s youthful exuberance (or so the mainstream media likes to call it, in typically meaningless bluster.)
Counterpunch’s Alexander Cockburn tells it like it is:
His [Biden’s] “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish… “neo-conservatism”. Here again the ticket is well balanced, since Senator Obama has, within a very brief time-frame,… exhibited great fidelity to the same creed…
Why did Obama chose Biden? One important constituency pressing for Biden was no doubt the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Obama, no matter how fervent his proclamations of support for Israel, has always been viewed with some suspicion by the lobby. For half the lifespan of the state of Israel, Biden has proved himself its unswerving acolyte in the senate.
And Obama picked Biden for the same reason Michael Dukakis chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988: the marriage of youth and experience, so reassuring to uncertain voters but most of all to the elites, that nothing dangerous or unusual will discommode business as usual.
Biden supported the Iraq war, too.