From David Swerdlick, who said it before I did:
Memo to Joe Biden
By David Swerdlick | TheRoot.comTo beat Sarah Palin, keep it clean, articulate and boring.
Exactly right. No quips. No one-liners. And for God’s sake, no zingers. Just answer the questions as dully as possible. Palin will take care of herself, one way or the other, and anything Biden says about her or her qualifications can only backfire.
Please share widely!
Biden should spend the whole night hitting John “I parachuted in to save the day!” McCain.
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p>As you said, Palin will take care of herself. I think a couple of corrections where she lies would be nice, though. Nice corrections, but corrections none the less.
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p>If Biden is TOO nice, it’ll sound condescending (pat pat aren’t you cute), a circumstance that women know all too damn well, and could backfire too. He needs to treat her like she were any other candidate.
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p>The Dems did, in the primary debates with Hillary. That never backfired.
Yes, he should talk about McCain — that’s the VP’s role. But there’s no need to pile on Palin.
Would you be advising Biden to not attack a VP Romney?
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p>If yes, then fine. If no, then it’s a double standard and I’m telling you, women hate condescending pats on the head as much as they hate unfair attacks. If the attacks are fair, and done with a modicum of respect due anyone chosen as VP (heaven help me, given how little respect McGOO had for the office by CHOOSING Palin!) then I think it would come across fine.
Mitt is a man. Palin is a woman. That is true.
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p>But Mitt is at least a credible Presidential candidate (if also a total phoney). Sure, his stint in MA was merely a launchpad for his Presidential run, but he can at least name a couple newspapers, knows a thing or two about economics & running businesses, and so forth.
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p>Palin is a train wreck, not because she’s a woman, but because both her record and her recent interviews show that she is really not fit for the job. Ambitious, yes, but also totally in over her head.
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p>The advice put forth is to let her further demonstrate that, and to do nothing that might make people feel for her as a victim.
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p>Of course, this may not work; though Palin is indeed a train wreck, she showed at the RNC convention that she can at least appear plausible for short periods of time.
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p>It’s not a double standard, it’s different circumstances. If the VP was a viable female like Christine Todd Whitman, that would call for a different strategy.
as long as she has a teleprompter!! I suspect that this is all totally moot, she will do herself in.
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p>However, if the method is “hands off, don’t question her at all” by Biden, I’m telling you, I would be offended that she were treated with kid gloves. Did anyone treat Dan Quayle with kid gloves? It still could backfire.
You do remember that Lloyd’s zinger to end all zingers kind of backfired? And that Dan Quayle did serve as VP?
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p>I agree, it could be problematic if Biden were too nice. But the point is that the risk-reward for attacking Palin is relatively low. His best strategy is probably to be pretty neutral with regards to Palin (though if Palin somehow appears to be doing OK, he should have a Plan B set of attacks ready).
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p>If I were Biden, I’d give short, crisp answers to each question, then say “But you’ve heard all this stuff from me before. I cede the rest of my time to Gov. Palin.”
“But you’ve heard all this stuff from me before. I cede the rest of my time to Gov. Palin.”
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p>Give her enough rope to hang herself, eh?
I didn’t make that up; I saw someone else suggest that either here at BMG or some other corner of the Intraweb…
And Palin isn’t the first female bonehead politician Biden will have confronted in his career. He can easily show respect to her position as candidate without having to pull the punches.
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p>I agree with the general sentiment that she may sink herself before he even gets the chance. But he shouldn’t wait too long for her to do the job. There is the chance that she’ll come off ok in voters’ eyes, and he will have missed his one and only opportunity if he is passive.
with Palin being female. Has everything to do with her having uniquely self-destructed in the few weeks she’s been in the public eye here in the lower 48, combined with Joe Biden’s unfortunate penchant for trying to be clever and planting his foot firmly in his mouth. Biden LOVES to hear himself talk, and thinks he’s quite clever. He needs to get a million miles away from all that. This is much about Biden as about Palin. The worst thing that could happen is that the take-away story from the debate is about Biden.
… to want him to ask her about abortion. She’s on record as not wanting to jail women who get them. This leads to some questions that put her in a corner.
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p>Tempting, but you’re probably right.
if abortion is the Democrats’ strongest issue, politically? That is, will emphasizing Palin’s anti-abortion stance help Democrats to win the election? I would think that keeping the emphasis on the economy and foreign policy might be wiser, as the GOP has so famously botched both.
However, I am perhaps too biased on this issue.
are pro choice and worried about it as a right, when asked.
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p>Anyway, most people who are pro life say they don’t want women who get abortions jailed, so it’s not like Palin’s stand is actually new…
… issue if you followed the asserted premises to their logical conclusions.
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p>The majority of people want choice. The vast majority of people wouldn’t want to criminalize women who have abortions (even self described avid pro-life protesters).
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p>The people who cater to the loud anti-choice minority necessarily adopt sympathy with their cause, but are never called on for the specifics. These specifics (as I’ve outlined above), when pointed out, only serve to highlight either just how far from the majority these positions are or highlight the stark horrors (women going to jail or the chair) of the consequences of these positions.
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p>I’ve never seen a candidate ever have to contend with those details. Knowing, however, that debating the fine points will either reveal a back-pedaling or an adoption of positions unacceptable (even offensive) to the majority, I think such a debate has the potential to be used to devastating effect.
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p>I agree, however, that in the context of current events and debates this is probably a bit of a side track. Seeing the potential, as described above, just makes it tempting for me.
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p>(sigh)
I was looking for a link I had used a while ago to ‘back this up’ but I had trouble finding it earlier today.
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p>I finally found it though.
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p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
* Does she think abortion should be a crime?
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p>Yes, but as long as it remains a private matter between a woman and her daughter, it cannot be prosecuted. So any attempted prosecutions would fail in court, unless the woman or doctor were to make it public.
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p> * If it should be a crime for doctors, why not the consenting women who go to them for abortions?
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p>It should be a crime to advertise or openly provide abortions.
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p> * If there is no punishment for women isn’t that inconsistent with wanting abortion to be a crime?
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p>Yes, but medical privacy is a more compelling interest.
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p> * What does it mean to say one is not pro-choice if one doesn’t want abortion to be a crime?… How would you remove the choice of abortion without criminalizing it?
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p>N/A, it certainly should be criminal, it should not be considered an acceptable, expected legal option to end a pregnancy.
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p> * If the punishment (or lack thereof) for of abortion (crime or not) is somehow less than for murder, doesn’t that support that abortion is not equivalent to murder?
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p>It’s murder, but not all murder is punished the same. This should be punished more like rape, because the effect of the crime on society is felt more as a seizing of another person’s reproductive rights, which is what rape is (or ought to be, currently it is physical assault involving penetration of any oriface, which insults and trivializes true rape). Abortion leads to men becoming fathers against their will, because they assumed an abortion would be chosen if a pregnancy occurred.
doh!
A crime that shouldn’t be prosecuted. It doesn’t make sense to call such a thing a crime at all, but rather a preference (or if you’re religious, a sin). You’ve invented a whole new class of act, that violates our sense of what a crime is. Our sense of justice is that acts of a nature that we, in our collective civic expression, determine to be criminal are wrong in such a way that there should be consequences for there commitment,… consequences in the form of (or for purposes of) ‘civic revenge’, ‘reciprocity’, or ‘deterrence’, or any combination.
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p>”It should be a crime to advertise or openly provide abortions.”
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p>Sort of like DADT, and makes about as much sense. If the act isn’t illegal after the fact, how is it that it should be illegal to talk about it before the fact? Restrictions on advertising for a legal act I could see.
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p>”Yes, but medical privacy is a more compelling interest.”
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p>Is this an assertion that ‘it should be a crime complete with punishment, but because of medical privacy we choose not to prosecute’? Again, it’s problematic to call something you won’t prosecute a crime rather than a preference. Also this doesn’t cover the doctors. It is absolutely possible to prosecute a doctor for a ‘medical’ crime while simultaneously maintaining privacy. We maintain privacy all the time in family court cases all the time. Not to mention national security cases.
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p>”N/A, it certainly should be criminal, it should not be considered an acceptable, expected legal option to end a pregnancy.”
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p>Again with the crime vs. preference. If you’re going to exclude it as a legal option, then it has to be a crime. If it’s a crime, then there has to be consequences, otherwise it makes no sense to make the assertion that it is a crime.
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p>”It’s murder, but not all murder is punished the same. This should be punished more like rape…”
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p>Indeed, not all murder is punished the same. My sense is that we, as a society, tend to find premeditated killing of an innocent youth to be more heinous and worthy of greater punishment. Your assertion seems to be that we should punish abortion less (indeed, not at all). If that were to satisfy our sense of justice while simultaneously our sense of justice in punishing the premeditated killing of innocent youth in general, one must conclude that our sense is that abortion isn’t a category of premeditated killing of innocent youth. It certainly can’t be argued that it isn’t premeditated. Perhaps it isn’t killing. Perhaps an ‘innocent’ fetus is ‘less’ valued than innocent youth. Also bringing up the case of rape is interesting. Two thoughts: 1) many people would like the death penalty for rape and, 2) describing abortion as more analogous to rape undercuts any sense that it is analogous to murder.
A crime that shouldn’t be prosecuted.
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p>It’s like how you can’t prosecute a murder with ill-gotten evidence. If the cops enter the suspect’s house without a warrant and find the bloody knife and a video of the suspect stabbing the victim to death, the guy would go free because the evidence was gathered in a way that violated the suspect’s rights. But there was certainly a crime committed. This is the same, because the mere act of investigating if an abortion was performed violates the woman’s right to medical privacy, so they cannot by definition be prosecuted. But there is still a crime.
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p>If the act isn’t illegal after the fact, how is it that it should be illegal to talk about it before the fact? Restrictions on advertising for a legal act I could see.
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p>? But it would be illegal, and so advertising or offering abortions publicly should be illegal. Also, if a woman were to go public about her abortion, it would be like the murderer above allowing the officers into his home to find the evidence of his crime, and she’d no longer be protected from prosecution due to ill-gotten evidence.
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p>Is this an assertion that ‘it should be a crime complete with punishment, but because of medical privacy we choose not to prosecute’? Again, it’s problematic to call something you won’t prosecute a crime rather than a preference. Also this doesn’t cover the doctors. It is absolutely possible to prosecute a doctor for a ‘medical’ crime while simultaneously maintaining privacy.
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p>We don’t just choose not to prosecute it, we cannot prosecute it without violating her rights. The doctor is considered part of the woman due to the doctor-patient relationship and is covered by her privacy. The state cannot ask the doctor what happened in the doctor’s office because it violates the patient’s privacy. I’m not sure what you have in mind by “medical crime” but I would guess that the patient would have to want to be prosecuted but also want their privacy protected.
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p>If it’s a crime, then there has to be consequences, otherwise it makes no sense to make the assertion that it is a crime.
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p>There’d be consequences if the patient relinquished her privacy and went public about it, because then there would be evidence of a crime.
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p>My sense is that we, as a society, tend to find premeditated killing of an innocent youth to be more heinous and worthy of greater punishment. Your assertion seems to be that we should punish abortion less (indeed, not at all).
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p>If there’s no evidence of a crime, there is nothing to punish. But if there is, I don’t think we as a society find abortion or even infanticide to be more heinous than killing older people. Heinousness might peak at killing children because they are due more protection, not less, and it might tail off as people become adults, and then become heinous again with killing the elderly.
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p>Two thoughts: 1) many people would like the death penalty for rape and, 2) describing abortion as more analogous to rape undercuts any sense that it is analogous to murder.
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p>It IS murder, not analogous to murder, but its effect is analogous to rape, so its punishment should be analogous to rape. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but I don’t think rape should be as harshly punished as murder.
Point one… crime without punishment. Your example analogy isn’t analagous. Your example isn’t one where it prosecution isn’t desired but rather technically impossible. Your ‘solution’ for the ‘crime’ of abortion is a ‘willful’ non-prosecution. Not having evidence makes the decision not to prosecute almost entirely ‘out of your hands’. Deciding, on your own and not merely due to circumstance, to not prosecute any instance of a crime is tantamount to admitting it isn’t a crime at all. If the excuse is medical privacy… again this is a non-starter because while medical privacy could insulate the medical information from becoming public record, there are mechanisms for trials in which facts are not available for public disclosure. It happens all the time as I’ve shown in my previous comment. This makes the privacy argument another non-starter.
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p>While I grant you that if it could be said that your example of ‘non-prosecution due to lack of evidence’ was analogous to and could be a supportive justification of ‘willful non-prosecution on the basis of medical privacy’, your conclusions would logically follow. But, for the reasons outlined above, I think the justification you present for a non-prosecutable crime not applicable.
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p>This all really goes back to the point that if there is no desire to attach consequences to the commission of a particular crime, one really has to question if it is a crime at all. Just like there is a ‘repeatability’ assumption (the same acts in the same circumstances demand the same response from our sense of justice) in the concept of justice, there is a ‘deserving of consequence’ assumption in the very concept a crime. I don’t think the concepts of crime and consequence are divorcable.
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p>I think it’s perfectly acceptable to feel negatively about a behavior that isn’t a crime and I think that is more applicable to what you’re asserting when you say ‘it’s bad but shouldn’t be punished’.
Who said there was no desire to prosecute the crime? There certainly is, as i noted by saying that the state would prosecute if the crime became public, and as the state would make clear by prohibiting advertising abortion. It’s just that the act of asking “were you ever pregnant” violates a person’s privacy, since they are the only person to know (and their doctor is subsumed into their realm of privacy as doctors should be). It’s a Fifth Amendment principle of not having to admit your secrets known only to yourself. It’s where the whole penumbra emanates from. Roe v. Wade was right about abortion not being prosecutable, but people are wrong in extending that to thinking that abortion cannot be a crime. That’s why it still exists as a crime on the books of many states.
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p>It’s perfectly acceptable that things are crimes even if good normal people you know might do them. None of us are speckless, or need to be. I think a lot of people think that anything they do must be legal, because they have been denied a chance to accept God’s spiritual love and forgiveness by modern athiesm and bleak Big Bang meaninglessness, so their salvation must come instead from seeking state approval of their very human proclivities and vices.
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p>And it’s perfectly OK for society to value privacy and due process over making sure that every crime is punished. That’s why we have those rules of evidence that sometimes set killers free, because it’s more important to respect privacy than punish murder. It doesn’t condone abortion to accept that women have the private ability to do it without the public having a right to know about it.
“And it’s perfectly OK for society to value privacy and due process over making sure that every crime is punished.”
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p>While it’s ok for society to value privacy and simultaneously value the prosecution of crime, when these two things are in conflict it is not the case that it’s ok to ignore one in preference of the other. Instead an accommodation is reached in the prosecution process to protect any privacy interests. This happens in family court all the time. This happens in juvenile court all the time. Your choice of ‘either or’ is a false choice. Holding fast to the idea that it a mutually exclusive choice is to either violate our sense of just privacy or our sense of just punishment or both. By refusing to go through with a prosecution because of a refusal to mitigate privacy interests (like we do all the time) is to ‘condone abortion’. In condoning it we absolve it of criminality.
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p>Also… God has nothing to do with this.
when these two things are in conflict it is not the case that it’s ok to ignore one in preference of the other.
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p>Yes it is, we throw out murder convictions based on evidence obtained by violating the killer’s privacy. The killer walks away. That doesn’t mean we there was no crime or we don’t want to punish him for it, it means we value privacy more.
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p>And we would prosecute abortions if we ever find out about them, but we can’t find out about abortions that are kept private. That doesn’t make them legal to do, it just means we don’t prosecute crimes when there is no evidence of a crime having been committed.
This is one of the marvelously odd things about the anti-abortion movement. They rarely propose criminal sanctions. There’s a reason for that.
… to a video (youtube I think) of someone interviewing abortion protesters asking about if abortion should be illegal and the following up with asking what the punishment for having an illegal abortion should be. The cognitive dissonance was deafening. I tried finding it earlier today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
It should be illegal but there shouldn’t be a punishment!
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p>”I’ve never really thought about it.”
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p>It’s as if these people are all pro-choice but don’t realize it — or they want to make abortion equivalent to driving 5 mph over the speed limit: illegal but never prosecuted.
Answer the question, succinctly (which is hard for him), and stop talking. I, too, think he should basically ignore her and direct his criticism at McCain’s record and policies.
Get in and get out.
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p>And above all: let her talk.
(typed at the same time so we didn’t see each other’s comments)
Me: I’m just praying Biden will have the smarts not to attack her directly or they will spin it as “Bad guy offending a woman”. All he needs to do is look into the camera, answer the questions and let her destroy herself.
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p>Friend: He doesn’t need to attack. All he has to do is ask the hard questions and sit back and watch her make an idiot of herself.
…as my dream VP debate, which would have been Mitt and Hillary…ah, well, on to 2012…
Probably Palin will be presupplied with a bunch of attack tidbits about Biden, spoonfed her by Karl Rove or somebody. I can’t see any reason for her not to try to be as negative as possible, so that will probably be her main strategy (“the best defense…”, etc.. What has she go to lose by attacking hard and fast, making stuff up if necessary? I bet she’ll be on the offensive all night if the moderator lets her. Remember, Biden’s actually been around, and “on the record”, for a long time, so there are doubtless some things that could be exploited- statements, votes, associates, photographs (Biden in a tank, perhaps??) etc. from the past that Palin and/or McPalin’s people will try to make him answer for in one way or another.
Be genial, smooth, professional and forgettable. Palin will take care of the rest.
Why is she able to talk out of her neck and spew trash regarding Obama’s job as a community organizer and Biden’s age? When she is on the telepromter she is down right nasty. You think that they would have her behaving with a bit more humility considering the disastrous interviews over the past few weeks. Why is there a double standard? Hillary had to take it and Palin should too! I say NO MERCY JOE! At this point, she is such a not likeable person. For a moment I felt bad for her, and the fact that she is “supremely and uniquely unqualified” (carville), but right after her gaffes she was spewing venom in front of the teleprompter, no humility whatsoever. I find it quite annoying!
Yes, he should absolutely call her out if she says something outrageous or stupid, though do it in a way that’s not mean or bullying. I don’t think Biden is mean so as long as he doesn’t pull a Rick Lazio and literally get in her face like Lazio did to Hillary he’ll be fine. Speaking of Hillary, does anyone really think the Republicans would be wringing their hands about this if she were our nominee for either spot. I say if Palin says she’s ready for prime time, make her prove it!
conforms with my notions of fairness and my irritation at being lectured by a smug ignoramus. However, McCain’s lack of eye contact, Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, and Gore’s sighs were all trouble. Low-information voters are not so very rational. They may not be able to find the Gaza strip on the map, remember the Dred Scott decision, or tell Sunni from Shia, but they do go in for theater criticism.