"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee [Joe Biden] warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you--not financially to help him--we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right....
"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I am not being falsely humble with you. I think I can be value added, but this guy has it," the Senate Foreign Relations chairman said of Obama. "This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us....Perhaps what we have here is the failure NOT to communicate. One can't imagine that this sits well with Barack Obama. But maybe it does. Maybe it sets him up perfectly. After all, he's the one who insisted that we must not play the fear card in the same paragraph in which he told us that Americans are less safe than ever. Maybe he's well-placed to blame all sorts of things on the Bush Administration; such blame will provide ample cover for months, even if a President Obama himself is the one worthy of blame. And maybe we are already hearing the Obama camp admit that "facts on the ground" change everything; maybe we are witnessing exactly the sort of thing the Bush Administration had to do when faced with the BIG PICTURE: it had to make "tough decisions" that were "unpopular" and brought "the polling so down."
"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision'," Biden continued. "Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will when they're made, they're not likely to be as popular as they sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."
Maybe in the end, we are seeing Joe Biden set us up for the fact that Barack Obama is himself McSame, or more of the same, or four more years of George W. Bush.
Or maybe, just maybe, we've heard Joe Biden play a different sort of fear card: Barack Obama is NOT ready to be president.
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