Ross remains convinced that Biden’s remarks were a gaffe and a very bad one at that:

He specifically highlighted Obama’s youth as a reason to expect a “generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy,” and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy – whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It’s true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it’s true that John McCain’s years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won’t exempt him from that rule. And maybe that’s what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate’s youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months.

I will grant that Biden wasn’t making a generic statement that Presidents often face international challenges early in their first year, but was making the (overconfident?) claim that because Obama is about to be elected we can expect President Obama to face such a challenge.  This still seems unremarkable considering the instability in a number of regions where Washington either does or claims to have an interest.  He also said that Obama is 47 years old (this is true) and brilliant (many people would agree), so Biden probably thought the latter was reassuring to anyone concerned about Obama’s inexperience.  Before that, though, he compared him to Kennedy.  The Kennedy comparison is where things get tricky.  It’s a bit like comparing Bush to Truman in that the comparison is either a gross insult or a huge compliment depending on your opinion of Truman. 

If you believe the hype about Truman, it means that Bush will one day be regarded as a wise and far-seeing President who laid the foundations for the prosecution of the so-called Long War, or if you judge Truman primarily on his generally poor decisions in office you will regard Bush as Trumanesque in the worst sense, a failure and an embarrassment.  In this case, I expect that Biden embraces the mythology about President Kennedy as much as most Democrats, so that when he compares Obama to Kennedy he likely does not have the failed summit in Vienna or the Bay of Pigs in mind, and he is probably not thinking of how the Vienna summit and failed Cuba attack directly invited and led to the Missile Crisis.  In this mythology that Biden is repeating, “the world” just decided to test Kennedy, as if his actions had nothing to do with bringing on that test. 

The funny thing about this mini-controversy is that McCain has reacted with incredulity that Biden would have said this and seems horrified that this has not become a bigger problem for Obama.  In McCain’s eyes, Obama is the erratic, inconsistent one, so why would you want him to be President at a time of crisis?  Of course, that’s the central argument of McCain’s entire campaign: he is the steady, experienced hand who will pilot the ship safely through the storm.  The trouble is that he has repeatedly shown that this isn’t true.  McCain can insist all he likes that his election will not invite international challenges, but the far more troubling thing about McCain is that fewer and fewer people trust him to respond responsibly if those challenges were to arise.  Had Biden said these things two months ago, they might have had some impact.  However, after having compared the responses of the two men over the last two or three months to at least a couple major crises, a majority would probably prefer a President who will be challenged and proves to be better-suited to that challenge than a President who is able to get by on bluster and reputation for a year or two but is completely unsuited to leading in a crisis when it comes.  Of course, none of that guarantees that Obama will be successful, but there is more reason to think that of him than about his opponent, and one way to make that contrast without attacking McCain by name is to remind his audience that the world is volatile and dangerous.  

The interesting thing about what Biden said is that it reinforced the contrast between the two candidates in a way that undermines McCain’s central argument, because only McCain’s loyal partisans now believe him to be the safe pick who could offer reassuring, stable leadership.  This reminds me of one of the striking things about Obama’s selection of Biden and Obama’s campaign for the last year and a half: Obama has made the Democratic ticket the ticket focused on foreign policy and national security to a much greater degree than past tickets, and he has campaigned throughout the cycle on the assumption that foreign policy is actually one of his strengths despite his lack of experience.  Whether he meant to or not, Biden has done something unusual for a Democrat in emphasizing the dangers and potential threats in the world, which reflects a similar sort of confidence that the Democratic ticket is simply better when it comes to foreign policy. 

This is virtually incomprehensible to the GOP candidates and their supporters, who keep assuming that this is a major liability for Obama.  In a lot of the news and blog reaction to this story, you can see many journalists and liberal bloggers getting back into the “defensive crouch,” as if to say, “Don’t talk about foreign threats, you idiot!  We always lose when we talk about that!  Don’t remind people how inexperienced Obama is!”  Perhaps in a very different world, they might have a point, but this mini-controversy is electorally much less important than it might otherwise be because national security voters make up a much smaller portion of the electorate than those voting on economic issues.  Most of the national security voters had already reflexively aligned themselves with McCain long ago (which I suspect is a function of how many Republicans place national security as their top priority, rather than being a result of any obvious McCain edge on this subject), so it’s not as if Biden is going to drive away any votes by saying this.  Even Rasmussen’s latest finding, which does show that 59% are concerned about a crisis early in an Obama Presidency, shows that the public is evenly divided on who can be trusted more in an international crisis: 49% say McCain and 48% say Obama.  If it were at all obvious that McCain is better-suited to handling international crises, the numbers would not be that close and then Biden’s remarks might have been significant enough to be worth spending all this time discussing.