Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to

Posted by Jason Ibrahim

Last week, Vice Presidential candidate and Delaware Senator Joe Biden used his command of the past to interpret the present, providing Katie Couric with wit and wisdom for our troubled financial markets from the Great Depression of the 1930's. Biden said, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

There are a couple aspects of Professor Biden's lecture that should make us want to cut class, namely:

1. Roosevelt wasn't elected president until 1932. It would be well over three years between the crash of 1929 and his inauguration in 1933.
2. His famous "Fireside Chats" were conducted over the radio, as television had by that time just been invented, and was decades away from either 1929 or 1933.

There's nothing unusual about politicians misspeaking, even in public. Everyone remembers President Clinton's infamous "that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is"; President Bush has even made misspeaking a central part of his "strategery", causing his opponents to "misunderestimate" him. The granddaddy of them all though, for those of us born since Nixon's resignation, was uttered by J. Danforth Quayle in Trenton, New Jersey. While officiating a spelling bee, the vice president corrected a contestant's spelling of "potato", to which he affixed an extraneous, trailing "e". The media and fellow politicians ate this up, of course, subsequently lambasting Quayle for his gaffe. Many of his detractors claimed, with tenuous logic, that a man who could not spell the word potato was unfit to be making high-level executive decisions for the country. Leaving aside the valid etymological debate, I can see at least one significant difference between the Quayle and Biden blunders.

What makes Biden's anti-historical revisionism the height of irony is this: Biden is being sold to us as the experience on the ticket. In the 1992 election Dan Quayle was by far the more untested of the candidates. His running mate, George H.W. Bush, was already president, had had previous executive experience as the vice president for eight years, and as the head of the CIA before that, not to mention prior legislative experience as a Congressman. No one in his right mind thinks that Obama, a man whose previous credentials include only 11 years in deliberative, legislative bodies-and 0 in an executive position higher than a lemonade stand-is fit to be Chief Executive without a little help from an old hand. Obama's campaign staff understands this, and, in large part, it drives their selection of Biden, the six-term Senator from Delaware. If these kinds of missteps are the experience Obama and Biden wish to bring to the executive branch, well...can I see my other options?

Thankfully, our founding fathers put in place a robust and well-planned government that could withstand four or even eight years of Obama (although our founding documents would seem rife with misspellings to our modern eyes.) I hope that, if elected, Messrs. Obama and Biden would rise to the challenges put before them-but I also hope it won't come to that.

Now that you know my opinion, what's yours? Drop me a line and let me know what you think.

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