Saturday, August 23, 2008

So it’s Biden

Well, I am a bit disappointed; it would have been interesting to see a more conservative candidate as Obama’s VP. On the other hand, I’m not panicking—perhaps it will serve as a deterrent to any crazy Reaganites who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights at President Obama.

One of Biden’s best-known moments, of course, was his 1987 appropriation of a portion of a speech by UK Labour candidate Neil Kinnock. In previous speeches, he’d credited Kinnock; in the one speech that was videotaped, at the Iowa State Fair forum, he didn’t.

But this 19-year-old mistake is what the Bush-groupies are going to be yabbling about for months to come.

Biden comes about his Democratic roots honestly; he’s got an unassailable blue-collar background. For that matter, so does Obama; he pulled himself up through college loans and hard work. But for some reason, they’re the “elitists” in this election, according to the GOP.

It’s downright baffling how desperate and stupid the GOP has become.

The polls are showing a pretty close race at the moment as well, which is frustrating; I want to see the GOP positively spanked in this election. No other outcome will result in the sort of critical reformation the party needs.

There’s quite a bit for the thoughtful Republican to cringe about in Biden’s legislative record—his support for the Iraq war (which is going to be difficult for Obama to navigate), and his record of interventionism in general while on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. One thing I don’t begrudge is his support of tax deductions and loan programs for families who wish to send their kids to college.

In any case, it’s not a bad choice. I worry that Biden’s reputation for unwise off-the-cuff remarks will wind up smudging the reputation of an Obama administration. But he is generally a left-leaning centrist, and that’s a more palatable choice than a full-on leftist.

Meta

You’ll note that it’s been more than two months since I’ve posted. I’d like to be able to say that this is because nothing has been happening that’s been worthy of comment, but that’s not true.

When I began this site, one of the things I wanted to do was be a contrast to most of the other political-pundit sites. Andrew Sullivan, for example, posts dozens of times a day, and some of it is pretty fluffy content. I didn’t mind posting less often, but I wanted all my posts to be complete thoughts, perhaps participating in debate on occasion with an interested reader, provided I had any.

Andrew has a certain luxury: his site is his job. He gets paid for it, and while he works hard at it, he is rewarded for it. Me? I have no such recompense. I may eventually add some advertising to this site, or put up a donations system or some such, but I don’t even expect it will pay for anything more than the domain name.

So why haven’t I been posting? My day job has a looming project deadline in a few months, and everyone on the team I work with has been putting in a lot of hours. That means that this site suffers as a result. I have fourteen half-finished essays in my drafts pile, and they’re horribly out of date by this point.

In order to counter for this, a few things are going to happen. First, I’m going to be making much shorter entries. Second, the RSS feed is going back to click-through-to-read-the-rest-of-the-article; because I won’t have the time to polish all the typos out, I want the freedom to edit after the fact, and RSS doesn’t really allow you to do that due to caching. I’m not yet sure about the frequency of future posts, but I will try to be better.

Of course, some would argue that these sorts of metaposts about the site itself are an impending sign of its demise. Perhaps, but I don’t think so yet.