Eugene McCarthy

The prospect of Joe Biden joining Barack Obama’s ticket, which seems to have grown more real in recent days, raises an interesting possibility: another Biden presidential campaign.

Given how his campaign turned out this year, the idea of Biden ever seeking the White House again seems (and probably is) unlikely. But, at least in theory, a tour de force performance as the VP nominee – think Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 – could spark popular interest in a future Biden presidential campaign that was missing in this past one. If Obama were to lose, Biden (again, theoretically) might then have a shot at the 2012 nomination (much the way the ’92 nomination was essentially Bentsen’s for the taking after his ’88 performance).  read more »

On the cover of this week's edition of Pat Buchanan's American Conservative, Hillary takes fire from another direction: The anti-war, anti-Israel right, to whom her support for her husband's interventions in the Balkans seem particularly damning, as does her hard line on Iran. The cover story's author, the libertarian Justin Raimondo, seems to want to make a kind of isolationist common-cause with the Left:

What does Hillary want? A smarter, smoother, better-planned interventionism, one that our allies find more amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant than the Republican version -- one that "levels with the American people" about the costs of empire and yet doesn't dispute the alleged necessity of American hegemony. As she finds her voice as a would-be commander in chief, it isn't one the traditional Left in this country will recognize. Hers is not the party of Eugene McCarthy but of the neoconservative [Marshall] Wittmann.