As I reported the other day, Evan Bayh is the favored candidate to find himself on Barack Obama’s ticket. Obama will probably finalize his decision today or tomorrow and then announce his decision as he comes out of his Hawaii vacation. The Obama campaign has offered to text message anyone who wants early word of the decision.
I don’t think that such a selection is the end of the world but I do think that this pro-Iraq War, (pro-Iran War?) senator who sat on a board of directors with some of McCain’s top neoconservative advisers needs as much “public vetting” as possible. I think that there are far better choices – a number of them.
Taylor Marsh lays out Evan Bayh’s neocon relations best. She writes:
What’s the Matter with Evan Bayh?
Besides the fact that he was the co-chair of the neocon pro-war Committee for the Liberation of Iraq? That his friends on that committee included Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman, James Woolsey and Randy Scheunemann. Oh, and one more, John McCain. You can bet that’s why he’s in the running though. The old Democratic ghost of being afraid of not looking “strong on defense” has reared it’s ugly head once again. With Obama being against the Iraq war, how could it not?
Randy Scheunemann, national security advisor to John McCain, is the guy who was simultaneously raking in big bucks from John McCain as well as the Government of Georgia while he was getting pledges of loyalty and mutual obligation and all that between Georgia’s President Saakashvili and John McCain.
Barack Obama terminated his campaign relationship with a volunteer adviser for Muslim outreach, Mazen Asbahi, because the young lawyer had been on a board eight years ago for a period of just three weeks before resigning because of discomfort with allegations about another board member who was essentially the Chicago-based American Muslim community’s version of Jeremiah Wright.
But Bayh did not resign from his neocon-dominated board and has made statements that he laments the possibility that Americans may be less pro-war, pro-conflict now because of their experience with the Iraq War.
How does that square with Obama’s “politics of hope”??
— Steve Clemons
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