If you elect us, I promise you all hell will break loose
Biden makes one of the stranger cases for a presidential candidate in recent memory:
It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy… Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
Two things occur to me here. One is Ramesh Ponnuru’s hysterical line about Obama and Kennedy. The other is that if a state power — not just a terrorist group — responds to Obama’s election in the way that it seems the Soviets responded to Kennedy’s, you would have two pretty strong cases to refute the realist belief that analysis of power relations is dispositive in predicting how states will behave. This will be of interest to IR theorists and no one else.
In fairness, Biden also manages to turn this into some kind of call for unity:
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.
Though, frankly, it sounds more like a cry for help than anything else, and for some reason reminds me of the lyrics to one of my all-time favorite songs: “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
(Hat tip: Ben Smith)