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Guess who Biden wanted on Dem presidential ticket?
Obama's running mate pushed for surprising choice 4 years ago

Presumed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has chosen for his running mate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., a man who once proposed the bottom half of the Democratic presidential ticket would best be filled with an unusual selection: Republican John McCain.

In two separate television interviews in the spring of 2004, Biden suggested the best way to bring unity to a divided nation was for the then-Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, to select McCain as his running mate.

"I think John McCain would be a great candidate for vice president. I mean it. I know John doesn't like me saying it, but the truth of the matter is, it is," Biden told Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press."

Only a few months earlier, Chris Matthews of MSNBC TV's "Hardball" asked Biden if he thought McCain would consider joining Kerry on a "fusion ticket."

"I think that this is time for unity in this country, and maybe it is time to have a guy like John McCain – a Republican – on the ticket with a guy he does like. They do get along," answered Biden, "and they don't have fundamental disagreements on major policies."

Leading up to the interview with Matthews, McCain expressed on ABC's "Good Morning America" that he might show interest in joining a Democrat on the ticket.

"John Kerry is a close friend of mine. We have been friends for years," McCain told the ABC morning show. "Obviously I would entertain it."

By the time he faced Russert on "Meet the Press," however, McCain had reshaped his comments.

"I will always take anyone's phone calls," McCain told Russert. "But I will not, I categorically will not do it."

Biden expressed both skepticism that McCain would accept and support for him if he did.

"Do I think it's going to happen? No," Biden told Russert. "But I think it is a reflection of the desire of this country and the desire of people in both parties to want to see this God-awful, vicious rift that exists in the nation healed, and John and John could go a long way to heal that rift."

When Matthews asked Biden if he would support John McCain as VP candidate on a Kerry ticket, Biden said, "I would. Yeah, if John Kerry said that's who he wanted, and McCain – I'd encourage McCain to say yes."

In the latter of the two interviews, Biden even praised McCain's readiness to serve as president. Tim Russert suggested Biden eliminate McCain from consideration and recommend another VP choice, but Biden refused, citing the importance of the vice president being qualified to fill the president's shoes, if necessary.

"I'm sticking with McCain," Biden said. "I think the single most important thing that John Kerry has to do is … to say that makes sense, that guy could be president, or that woman could be president. I think that's the single most important thing for people, when he or she is announced, say that person could be president."

It's all about power and control, not sense and sensibiltiy or loyalty.

Joe Biden: Hair We Can Believe In
08/27/2008
From Ann Coulter's column
 
Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention was great. As I write, he hasn't given it yet, but these are my favorite parts:

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and ... his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since."

Everyone acts as though Biden's outrageous plagiarism of British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock's speech during the 1988 presidential campaign was just a mistake, a slip of the tongue. Biden, his defenders say, had credited Kinnock in other speeches, but simply forgot to add the attribution one time.

First, Biden had failed to mention Kinnock more than once. Second, it was not just a matter of adding an attribution. On the occasions when Biden failed to credit Kinnock, he also had to alter Kinnock's speech to act as if he were describing the Biden family.

Kinnock said: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is (my wife) Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?"

Biden said: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?"

Kinnock's speech continued: "Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? Those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?"

Biden's speech continued: "Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?" Biden's Welsh accent was as phony as Madonna's British accent.

If this were merely a failure to cite Kinnock, why was Labor Leader Neil Kinnock talking about the Biden family and the coal mines of Pennsylvania?

Biden not only lifted -- as The New York Times reported -- Kinnock's "phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact," but also his entire life story.

Dismissing his theft of Kinnock's speech, Biden said at the time: "So what if I didn't attribute it to Kinnock? I can't quite understand this. If I was making up who I was, then that's one thing."

But Biden was making up who he was. And he was making up what kind of country this is.

The whole point of Kinnock's speech was to denounce the English class structure, where his grandfather couldn't get ahead, despite his talents. Thus, Kinnock concluded by saying his parents and grandparents couldn't advance "because there was no platform upon which they could stand."

That has never been true in this country. We have no class structure. People do get ahead by being smart and working hard.

The other side of the coin is that those born well are perfectly capable of falling from their perch of privilege, as expressed in the peculiarly American expression: "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Which is precisely what happened to the Biden family.

According to Vice Plagiarist Biden's own autobiography, his father was to the manor born. Biden's grandfather was an executive with the American Oil Co., and his father had all the advantages in life. "My dad," Biden writes in "Promises to Keep," "grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps."

But, in the blunt language of the Vanity Fair election blog, "he gotcha8ed away his fortune and Joe and his siblings grew up in a decidedly, and proudly, working-class Catholic home."

So why was Biden concluding his Kinnock-"inspired" speech with clenched fist, claiming that his family "didn't have a platform upon which to stand." The executive offices at the American Oil Co. sound like a pretty good platform.

The problem wasn't that Biden's father didn't have a platform, but that he fell off the platform. Far from sharing Kinnock's life story, the Biden family would have benefited from a strict British class system that holds up talentless aristocrats while keeping down the talented low-born.

No wonder the platform of the Democratic Party is to destroy capitalism: It allows people to get ahead on their talents and not their names.