Ed Morrissey wrote a commonsense response to all those Democratic dreams of booting Joe Biden off the ticket next year. But one of his reasons reveals, unintentionally perhaps, one of my biggest complains with modern politics:
For all that, though, the odds are long that President Obama will dump Biden, a man he chose to give the ticket more heft in foreign policy, a role from which Biden has retreated ever since the election. First, there is no indication that Obama is unhappy with his 2008 choice. But even if he has become disenchanted, he can’t do much about it. Unless Biden gets seriously ill, a change in running mate becomes a tacit admission of error in choosing him in the first place. The Rice-for-Cheney trade speculation also involved using Cheney’s very real heart disease as a handy alibi to avoid admitting a mistake in the first real test of a president. [Emphasis oh-so added]
If Mitt Romney could admit that RomneyCare was a flop, he’d be embraced by the Tea Party and become the nominee-aparent overnight. If Obama could admit that Obamanomics doesn’t work and reverse his course, we might yet have a Recovery Summer in time for his re-election. If Bush could have admitted he had the wrong SecDef in 2005, he might have saved the GOP Congress.
If, if, if.
Our “leaders” are so completely beholden to their carefully-coiffed media image — or at least what they image their media image to be — that it has become almost impossible to admit to human error.
Well, guess what? Our politicians are human. In fact, their faults and their virtues are probably both greater than the average mortal’s. Or else they wouldn’t be able to stomach running for office, much less holding office.
Our greatest politicians were the ones all-too-aware of their own humanity. We remember Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan because they remembered their own faults.
These modern jokers will go down in history as too big for their britches.
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