Check out our gal Courtney, along with author and activist Kenyon Farrow, Andrea Batista Schlesinger of the Drum Major Institute, and Lisa Witter of Fenton Communications, discuss the veepstakes with Laura Flanders. The segment was recorded before Biden was announced, but the panelists have a lot of great insights about what Obama's VP pick means, or should mean:

The snippet of the transcript that's about Biden is below the jump...

Courtney: I hate to sound like the downer realist in the room, but I'm from Colorado Springs, and a lot of my relatives are evangelical Christians, traditional Republicans but very upset about Bush's presidency, and really on the fence. I was recently home and they said, "You know, I'm just not sure what I'm gonna do here. I'm kind of interested in Obama..." And I really imagine the VP choice being the turning point for some of those kinds of folks, like my extended relatives, who may really go for Obama if they can get just a little bit of the security they need, a little bit of a "big daddy" VP sort of presence that might push them over the edge. As much as I'd love to talk about real progressive policy, I do have my eyes on the prize.

Laura Flanders: So who would be your pick, maybe with your relatives in mind?

Courtney: I think Biden, maybe. I mean, it's a hard call because there are things I can immediately say about each one of these candidates that makes me uneasy. As we said, there's not really a great choice. But I do think Biden has the sort of foreign policy expertise that people like my relatives are interested in.

Laura Flanders: Apart from your relatives... how will that play with those young voters you talked about who are infused with a sense of change -- this is not a change, to go with Biden -- who have been infused when a sense of the new, the young... Most of the people on Obama's list are pretty familiar faces from the Clinton years.

Courtney: I think the important thing to remember is young people aren't against old people, they're against old politics. As much as I do think Biden represents old politics in a lot of ways, he's really enthusiastic and he's always expressed -- sometimes in offensive ways -- his excitement about Obama. So I think it's important not to think that young people are against old people, that they're not going to vote for an old VP. I think that's too limited.

Kenyon Farrow: I remember in the debates at Howard University, which is the one time that everyone talked about their HIV/AIDS plan, that he also was very moralistic and finger-pointing at the black community for not doing enough about AIDS, which did not play well for me and a lot of people who do HIV/AIDS activism work. So a choice of Biden concerns me...

1 Comments

August 25, 2008 1:32 PM

[0+|0-]  jstein said:

Kenyon Farrow is great. He says some very interesting things and his book is great. His points on the nature of the Vice-Presidency having changed as a result of Cheney. I'd like it to change back, because we only have three branches of government. We don't get to have the VP working parallel to the President, he works under the president.

Glad to see Courtney on there.

I don't think that "left is center," realistically. I think that's a delusion we perpetuate in the blogosphere, and I think that it's one of the reasons why we are so let down when the elections are so close and when we realize that our candidates are not as popular as we'd like them to be.

Not everybody agrees with us, and I'm a little surprised that people who are so smart think that their belief (though I agree with it) is the majority.

We always think we have more friends than enemies because we spend more time thinking about our friends, and we spend me time hanging out with them. It's not necessarily true.

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