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It's the soundbite heard 'round the (political) world. Democrat Joe Biden suggested that his young running mate Barack Obama would be tested by international foes within the first six months of his administration, much as a young John Kennedy was tested by the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis.
Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ..We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we are going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
Biden, who has a reputation for shooting off his mouth, didn't stop there.
He's gonna need you -- not financially to help him -- we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.
Republicans were quick to exploit the gaffe. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, colleague and traveling sidekick to John McCain, thanked Biden at a rally in Bensalem, Pa., this morning. "Thank you for reminding us the way the world is," he said, and for reminding voters that "there's never been a candidate for president of the United States more tested than John McCain." Even the first-term governor of Alaska Sarah Palin weighed in, saying the White House is no place for "on-the-job training."
All of this suggests that Biden would be a far different vice president than Dick Cheney. In some sense, Biden is the anti-Cheney -- all talk, no stealth.
Cheney, known in some quarters as Darth Vader, specialized in influence from within. Using a team of legal talents, he steered President Bush to approve domestic wiretapping, keep documents and witnesses out of congressional hearings and authorize torture techniques for terrorist suspects.
Will Biden, like Cheney, keep his counsel to the president confidential? Or will his verbal excesses sour President Obama on even listening to him?
Obama might take a few pointers from Bush, who told Cheney not to talk so much in meetings where both of them were in attendance. Or at least that's what Oliver Stone says in his new movie "W."
Cheney has been the West Wing equivalent of a black hole, emitting nothing. Joe Biden emits, emotes, speculates, hypothecates. If he's the next vice president, we're in for some fun.
One of the key rules of politics so effectively exploited by Karl Rove is this: Neutralize your weakness by making it your strength.
How else to explain Gov. Sarah Palin's readiness in the vice presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden to trash life as it has been known in George W. Bush's Washington over the last eight years?
Keep in mind: President Bush's approval rating has fallen to 22% in the latest CBS News poll. (That's one point below Richard M. Nixon's lowest rating -- the modern-day standard for trashing a president).
The story first broke in London's Telegraph newspaper, under the headline "Barack Obama would consider charging Bush administration over Guantanamo." The article described a campaign event in Deerfield, Fla., in which, according to the Telegraph, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said:
"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."
Asked about the comment this morning on Fox News, Biden said it is Congress -- not a potential Obama administration -- that is investigating the White House.
And he denied today that an Obama administration would launch criminal investigations against the 43rd president of the United States.
"The Obama-Biden administration is not going to start off saying, "God, let's go take a lot at what [happened]." The American people want to know what we're going to do, not what happened."
Biden also had some things to say about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, calling it "impressive" but lacking in specifics. And he called the media's treatment of Palin's family life "sexist."
When the war between Georgia and Russia first broke out, Democrat Barack Obama was in Hawaii, on vacation. He interrupted his holiday to issue a statement of support for Georgia. But his words were more measured -- and came later -- than either the White House response or Republican John McCain's.
But this week, Obama beat the White House by more than an hour, and McCain by two. Could it be that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, newly added to the Obama team as his running mate, has added some muscle?
The speeded-up Obama response came after Russia recognized two breakaway regions -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent countries.
In his statement, issued around 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Obama said the White House should call for a U.N. Security Council meeting to condemn Russia's action. About 45 minutes later, the White House issued a statement from President Bush, vacationing at his ranch in Crawford. He too condemned the Russian ploy, saying, "We expect Russia to live up to its international commitments."
McCain weighed in around 4 p.m. EDT, nearly two hours after Obama and more than an hour after the White House. In some ways it was the most tempered of the three statements, saying Moscow's action "deserves condemnation from the entire international community."
And, in an unexpected twist, McCain added that his wife Cindy is currently in Georgia on a humanitarian mission. "I am proud that she has traveled to that war-torn country at this time," he said.
By picking Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has taken a page out of George Bush's 2000 campaign and picked a grownup who knows a thing or two about the adult world. Of course, the Cheney influence hasn't always worked out too well, so here's hoping Biden doesn't become another Darth Vader!
No vice president in American history has done as much damage to national security, constitutional integrity and the moral standing of the United States as Dick Cheney. Biden has aspects of the Cheney pick -- he's older, more seasoned and more adept at foreign policy than Obama. But no one imagines that Obama would delegate -- and all but abdicate -- critical decisions to Biden the way Bush has to Cheney.
Finally, Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News reports that White House political guru Karl Rove criticized the Biden pick on Fox News this morning, saying that his weighty resume only reminds voters how thin Obama's is.
But Karl found himself in deep water when a Fox News interviewer asked: Wasn't Dick Cheney picked to be George W. Bush's veep to balance the Texas governor's lack of experience? Did Cheney boost the ticket or just remind people of Bush's inexperience? Totally different, said Rove. Totally different.
Joe Biden has had some harsh things to say about President Bush over the years.
The senator from Delaware -- now Barack Obama's running mate -- said that Bush squandered an opportunity to rally the world behind the US after 9/11. Biden was so dubious about prospects for success in Iraq that he suggested a decentralized central government in Baghdad with a confederation of strong Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni provinces.
Biden has also accused the Bush White House of being tone deaf on civil liberties, torture and intelligence. "This is an administration beyond redemption," he told voters in Iowa while campaigning for president last year. "I was there for Nixon. This guy's worse."
But on the president's plan to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases around the world -- Bush recently signed a five-year, $48-billion bill to triple previous funding -- Biden has been unstinting in his praise.
"The president's emergency action program for HIV/AIDS has saved more than a million lives," Biden said. "It may be the greatest legacy this president leaves."
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
