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Part of the vot­ing public’s frus­tra­tion with the polit­ical class (politi­cians, pun­dits, com­ment­at­ors, etc…) has been the for­mu­laic way in which they approach prob­lems and per­ceived problems.

Mr. Shrike

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has argued repeatedly that Kevin Rudd’s anti-politics approach to counter this modus operandi

was a big factor in his suc­cess, and I don’t see any sub­stan­tial reason to dis­agree with him.

The reason I bring this is up is the chat­ter in the Amer­ican sphere over the poten­tial Vice Pres­id­en­tial picks of both major party can­did­ates. Obama appar­ently has a “prob­lem” with white male voters, and the pre­dict­able response to this is the “ameli­or­at­ive” VP-pick. The free advice is that Obama should pick someone who ticks all the boxes that he isn’t. Someone who will “bal­ance the ticket”. But as Ezra Klein points out, act­ing on this advice would be a fairly naked admis­sion that Obama believes that he lacks cer­tain fun­da­ment­ally import­ant qual­it­ies. And that would become its own news cycle. It is business-as-usual polit­ics. It is everything Obama has cam­paigned against. It is so Wash­ing­ton

Séance

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.

He has made it a found­a­tion of his cam­paign that he is the can­did­ate for change. The best VP for him then, is someone who will rein­force his pos­it­ive qual­it­ies. The whole tick­ing the boxes schtick makes me think of Apple vs. the rest of the industry. For example, Microsoft/Dell/SanDisk/etc…‘s response to the iPod was to cre­ate some­thing that “ticked all the boxes” (More stor­age, FM radio, blah blah blah). And yet, the com­pet­ing products failed [Did I just com­pare Obama to an iPod?!]. The responses were inex­plic­ably reac­tion­ary. They did not identify weak­nesses, or areas where improve­ments could be made. Instead some­thing “good enough” was thrown together, and this was some­how sup­posed to win over the public.

This is why Obama should not pick Jim Webb, or God for­bid Hil­lary Clin­ton. They would be too obvi­ously token­istic (among other things). They would be entirely anti­cip­ated choices, seen by every­one as a super­fi­cial attempt to “unite the party”.

Say­ing all that, I’m still quite bear­ish on Obama’s chances in Novem­ber. Cam­paign­ing on change whips up a lot feel-good emo­tion and enthu­si­asm, but is he offer­ing just a little too much of it? I think the Demo­crats have poten­tially snatched defeat from the jaws of vic­tory here. I believe Hil­lary Clin­ton would have ensured them a vic­tory (albeit prob­ably a nar­row one. Still, a win is a win.). The beauty of being the sac­ri­fi­cial bitch-Goddess tar­get of the other side for the bet­ter part of her adult life meant that she could have eas­ily swept aside and lumped together any cri­ti­cism the GOP could have thrown at her. “Haven’t we heard this all before?” and “What’s new?” would be the meme her spin doc­tors pumped to the media. The polit­ical class talks about “Clin­ton fatigue”, but what about “Clinton-bashing fatigue”? Obama on the other hand is fresh meat. And I’m not sure his change stick is enough to beat off the inev­it­able dirty attacks. He’ll either win big or lose big. And at this stage my feel­ing is that he’ll be trounced, in spite of the Demo­crats’ advant­age in all the polls. We’ll see come Novem­ber. For the sake of Amer­ic­ans without health care, I hope I’m wrong.