Posted by
Michael Goodell on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 4:17:19 PM
No doubt many of you waited with bated breath to learn my reaction to Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential selection. Unfortunately, I was in Colorado, ostensibly to attend a wedding, when the decision was made, and had no access to a computer.
I am happy to announce, however, that while “attending” the wedding, I managed to sit down with some advisors to the Junior Senator from Illinois, and I told them in no uncertain terms, to avoid Hillary at all costs. There were two reasons for this, I stressed. First, having Hillary as Veep would mean Bill would be in the White House, too, which would be tantamount to having three Presidents. This was a formula for disaster.
The second reason is that no Presidential candidate can possibly get elected if he is overshadowed intellectually, experientially and practically by his vice-presidential nominee. Though they saw the wisdom of my arguments, Obama’s advisors were at a loss. “Look, the guy’s an empty suit,” one frustrated advisor said to me. “How can we possibly find someone who won’t overshadow him?”
When I suggested America’s “Every Man,” the friend to working men and women everywhere, Joe Biden, they were exultant. “Of course,” they cried. “A cipher. Next to Biden, our guy will look as brilliant as he thinks he is.”
Now, to be honest, I thought their assessment of the Senior Senator from Delaware was a bit harsh. Granted, he’s been flitting around the edges of national prominence, representing one of only two states small enough to make him look large, and getting just about every foreign policy call wrong during his career, but the man has talents. He’s quick on his feet, a sharp debater, and a flexible and resourceful orator.
In fact, it is this last quality with which he will make his mark. In one of my last acts before leaving Colorado, I managed to get a hold of the text for his speech at the convention tonight. I reprint it here, in full:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in livery, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate–we can not hallow–this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who have fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Powerful words indeed. Not bad for the son of a Welsh coal miner.