If vice-presidential picks are a reflection of a campaign's conclusion midway through the general election, then this is what Biden says about the Obama campaign's lessons thus far: Voters don't believe in change. Not yet, anyway, They're open to it. But they're skeptical. They need to be persuaded, cajoled, convinced....Obama/Sebelius would have represented change. Visually, her and Obama on a stage together would have been the most powerful image of political transformation in decades. But a choice like her presupposed belief. Otherwise, you'd be adorning a cathedral that had no promise of parishioners.
As the election wore on, though, and Obama's poll numbers slackened and fell, they realized they needed to make their case. They needed an arguer. Someone able to make the case that the other guy is wrong, and Obama is right. That's, fundamentally, what Biden represents.
To me, this seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding about what "change" means. Yes, putting a black man and a woman in the White House would be a kind of change - maybe, for some people, a very important kind of change. But not the kind that is most important to our nation after eight years of Bush.
The problem with Bush's administration has not been one of demographics. Two black secretaries of state, one of them a woman. A Hispanic attorney general. The most diverse Cabinet in history. And yet all those Bush appointees from America's supposedly marginalized tribes did his (and Cheney's) bidding just as faithfully as Karl Rove.What we need - and what the Democrats are offering - is change from Republican policies. Electing leaders whose identities send a message of inclusion to all groups of Americans is not a bad thing. But what those leaders do is, at the end of the day, far more important.
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