The MBNA Factor

Kathy G. says of Joe Biden that “vote for the bankruptcy bill was unconscionable, and the man is a wholly owned subsidiary of the credit card companies.” It’s certainly true that I could not, in good conscience, imagine voting for the bankruptcy bill. But that’s one of the many reasons I wouldn’t make it in electoral politics — as best I can tell, everyone casts unconscionable votes in defense of home state industries. Certainly I’m not aware of any Senators who are innocent of this particular sin, and Barack Obama (coal, ethanol) is no exception to the general trend.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I have a hard time getting quite as worked up about some of the different people in play as a lot of folks in the peanut gallery. If I were the presidential candidate, or a key adviser to the candidate, it would be crucial to me to actually sit down and talk with some of these folks about some elements of their record. Certainly with Biden, his record on issues related to credit card companies is something you’d want to talk about. With Evan Bayh, you’d want to get a general sense of how he envisioned his role as a Democrat in a very conservative state. With anyone from a farm state, I’d want to know how genuinely emotionally and intellectually invested they were in status quo farm policies. But unfortunately as a blogger, I don’t have that luxury and neither do you. That’s not to say that people don’t deserve criticism for bad-on-the-merits votes cast as a sop to home state interests — on the contrary, it’s crucial that they receive criticism for it and that pressure exists for them to walk away from that record if they want to step into roles of national leadership — but it is worth keeping in perspective and recalling that it’ll be hard to find anyone who isn’t compromised in this regard.

I think Biden’s vote for the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a serious problem. It’s a bit hard for me to see how Obama simultaneously says that his “no” vote is an important demonstration of good judgment despite a lack of experience and also that Joe Biden is a great and experienced foreign policy expert. Maybe there’s a brilliant solution to that, but it seems tricky to me.