Delaware to the Rescue?

Excitement on Barley Mill Road in front of the Biden Residence/ Photo by my Mom

My family got advance warning last week that Barak Obama had picked Delaware Senator Joe Biden for his vice presidential candidate because they live near the Senator's home in Wilmington. My mother woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of helicopters racing back and forth from Washington or Illinois, and my Aunt Valerie passed out apples to the television crews waiting in the road outside the Biden residence.

Now that the word is out, the McCain campaign is making alot of noise about how Obama's choice of Biden is being made out of weakness -- to make up for Obama's perceived lack of foreign policy experience, or popularity among working class white Catholic voters. But picking Biden is hardly an act of desperation. Why on earth would you pick someone from rinky-dink Delaware unless you wanted to be judged on your own merits? Biden carries no great constituency along with him: Delaware has just three electoral votes, and was leaning towards Obama anyway.

I'm not sure how relevant it is to scan Biden's foreign policy record to see what's it in store for the Middle East. As vice president he would probably have just a marginal role in influencing foreign policy. And besides, his policies are pretty standard centrist American fare: diplomacy backed by military muscle, wary of an attack on Iran, strong on support for Israel, etc. One of his bolder ideas -- the tripartate division of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines, has fallen by the wayside now that the country has stabilized post-surge. (Though it may yet come back with a vengeance once the American withdrawal begins.)

What's more relevant about the Biden pick is what it says about how an Obama presidency is going to treat the rest of the world. There's a saying that war is the only way American learn geography (which might explain why many Americans don't know where Delaware is.) But that makes it all the more ironically inspiring that a lawmaker from a small-time state became the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden, a man who takes the Amtrak train home from Washington almost every evening, not only pays attention to what's going on in the world, he pays attention before the bombs start droppping. You know he actually came to Lebanon in 2005, after the Syrians withdrawal, on one of his many trips to the region? He didn't have anything particularly memorable to say -- Lebanese elections are confusing even to Lebanese -- but at least he made an effort. There aren't many points to be picked up by an American politician visiting an Arab country the size of Delaware.

Just doing your homework and showing up may not be enough to reverse the damage done during the last eight years. And the next administration may need a lot more creative idea's than Joe Biden's if it hopes to stem the decline of American power and prestige in the world, let alone make any contribution to something as monumentally difficult as peace in the Middle East. But it's a start. That and passing out apples.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut