Obama/Biden — Left And Lefter

Obama/Biden — Left And Lefter



By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: The Democratic convention is about to nominate two of the three most liberal members of the U.S. Senate as its presidential ticket. In some ways, Barack Obama's running mate is further left than he is.

National Journal found that based on his voting record, Barack Obama was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate for 2007. It ranked the six-term Delaware senator he chose as running mate to be the third most liberal senator.

Cutting and running in Iraq, for instance, as Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and most other congressional Democrats supported, was not politically-correct enough for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; he wanted to carve Iraq into three separate entities.

Each part would likely have been easier for Islamist terrorists to destabilize than the fledgling parliamentary democracy in Baghdad today. Had Biden's advice been followed when he proposed it two years ago, the country would likely be inflamed in civil war today.

What's more, as American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin noted in the Washington Post Tuesday, "Iran's Press TV seized on Biden's plan for partitioning Iraq and featured his statements with the headline 'U.S. plans to disintegrate Iraq.' " Making the destruction of Bush's presidency a priority over national security makes Joe Biden "Tehran's favorite senator," as Rubin calls him.

Biden even refused to vote for a bipartisan amendment classifying Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. His official rationale for opposing it was: "I don't trust this administration."

Unfortunately, this oh-so-seasoned foreign policy expert has trusted the Islamofascist administration running Iran all too much.

"Biden's unyielding pursuit of 'engagement' with Iran for more than a decade has made it easier for Tehran to pursue its nuclear program," Rubin says. In other words, Biden's personal ties with Tehran's Islamist regime have helped Iran come closer to developing weapons of mass destruction.

Foreign policy is only one area where Biden's radicalism exceeds even Obama's. As Tax Analysts' Chuck O'Toole noted on Tuesday, "on taxes, Biden has followed a path more overtly populist than the one Obama has walked, pushing for a more progressive tax code that shifts the tax burden away from lower and middle-income families and onto high earners and businesses."

While Obama would pair the expiration of the Bush tax cuts with a corporate tax rate cut, for instance, O'Toole noted: "In recent years, Biden has voted against corporate tax cuts, the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2006, and a motion to consider a permanent repeal of the estate tax."

The National Taxpayers Union (NTU) graded both Obama and Biden "F" for their votes on economic issues. But while Obama voted favorably only 5% of the time, according to the NTU, Biden voted right even less — just 4% of the time.

Biden's tax-and-spend economic radicalism did not, however, prevent him from voting with Republican senators in 2005 to shield his state's large credit card industry, cardholders be damned. (To attract jobs, Delaware in the 1980s turned itself into a legal mecca for charge-card companies with laws allowing higher interest rates and providing much greater protection from hostile takeovers.)

Barack Obama in 2005 voted against the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act." So did Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and John Kerry, D-Mass.

As recently as last month, Obama even attacked his GOP opponent Sen. John McCain for voting for it. "While I was opposing the credit-card industry's bankruptcy bill that made it harder for working families to climb out of debt, (McCain) was supporting it," Obama said, "and he even opposed helping families who were only in bankruptcy because of medical bills they couldn't pay."

But now Obama has a running mate who did vote for "the credit-card industry's bankruptcy bill" (as he pocketed more campaign cash from the credit card industry than almost anyone) — a law that President Bill Clinton in 2000 pocket-vetoed because, as Clinton said at the time, it was "tilting the playing field against those debtors who genuinely turn to bankruptcy for a fresh start."

It seems that the "regular Joe" Sen. Obama is running with is just as radical as he is, if not more so — except when he gets paid off by a big industry to stick it to working families.



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