Robert Shrum: The unnecessarily frenzied handwringing over Barack, Biden, and Bain
Robert Shrum
The unnecessarily frenzied handwringing over Barack, Biden, and Bain
The press keeps seizing on the ethics and effectiveness of Bain attacks, and imagining Obama dumping Biden for Clinton. Enough of this nonsense
posted on May 29, 2012, at 5:30 PM
We are in the season of political skywriting — of stories that capture attention, but not the decisive realities of the presidential contest. For all but tabloid purposes, why pay attention to the ravings of Donald Trump — except to score a minor point against Mitt Romney for taint by association with a comb-over in a clown suit?
The fundamentals of 2012 are set now and should be entirely visible even if they don't dominate a 24-hour information cycle ravenous for the latest titillation or speculation. That is all but inevitable as we cross from the pyrotechnics of the primaries, which provided real if weird news like Rick Perry's campaign-killing brain freeze, to the ramp-up of the ad wars and the run-up to the conventions and debates. The ads have just begun, and even early results are not yet in. The latter two events are a summer away. The interregnum invites the rise of sideshow stories — which, in recent days, featured hand-wringing over Obama's ads about Bain and recycled theories about dumping Joe Biden.
So first, the fundamentals — and the factors that might actually reshape them.
The president enters the general election with an electoral college advantage, a coherent narrative, and a powerful case against Romney that squarely fits that narrative. He's drawn his dividing line: Who stands up for you and who stands up for the few? Romney, for his (newly found) part, still has a worn and one-dimensional message that rests uneasily on the proposition that as a job creator in the private sector, he's the one to create jobs for the country — although he stumbled last week by promising higher unemployment at the end of 2016 than the level projected under current policies.
There are legions of national polls, some involving relentless daily tracking, which tell us... well, not much that matters, except that Romney is rock bottom with Hispanics and Obama has high levels of African-American support: 88 percent in the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey. That will certainly go higher and secure him somewhere around another 1 percent of the overall popular vote. But what matters, of course, are the battleground states, and Romney needs to win a whole lot of them to reach 270 electoral votes.
The real and obvious danger to the president is the possibility of economic slowdown or downturn. Romney and the Republicans are rooting for it — and the austere and doctrinaire chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, may actually provoke a deepening European slide that infects both the American and the global economies. In the face of the eurozone crisis, she is a profile in stolid stubbornness — and Obama's most dangerous opponent may be Merkel, not Mitt.
more...
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/228527/the-unnecessarily-frenzied-handwringing-over-barack-biden-and-bain
= new reply since forum marked as read
Joe's been a great VP so far and I thought that he was a good pick in 2008. I see no reason for him to be replaced by Hillary or anybody else unless he just doesn't want the job anymore. 
Such talk is about as nonsensical as President Obama voluntarily refusing to run for a second term was back in 2010-2011. 
