Pukhtoons, Palin and Biden

During American presidential election campaign, It had become fashionable to blame Sarah Palin for her silly pronouncements and now for John McCain’s election defeat. To some extent its right as Palin invigorated the conservative base but she alienated the independents and undecideds. The God-fearing mother-governor of Alaska was not fit for high office. Her television performances were an international embarrassment. In choosing Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, McCain proved that he was over-impulsive, cynical, and imprudent.

All true to an extent. It should be recognised, however, that Senator Joseph Biden, the man who will now be sworn in as vice-president in January, is just as disastrous a public figure as Sarah Palin. In fact, he might be worse. But we have to understand that more or less, the entire world is a patriarchal society and was looking more intently the flaws Palin was making but ignoring Biden just because, perhaps, he was a man. Or in other words, love for Obama was so intense that people did not bother to mind Badin’s blunders.

In the election and rejection of the two, who would suffer? I believe it will be Americans and Pukhtoons together. Their idiosyncrasies would prove to be sufferings of two nations though living far away from each other but affecting each other in a jiffy. Twin towers are erased there and the centre of terrorism is shifted overnight to Pukhto Zamaka. Terrorism happens there and the war on terror happens here. Credit crunch happens in Wall Street but the price hike happens in Peshawar. Obama is elected there but people are happy here.

At times during the campaign, the two vice-presidential candidates seemed to be vying to outdo each other in a stupidity contest. The six-term Senator Badin used his experience to come out on top. She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was; he confessed that Hillary Clinton would make a better vice-president than him. She could only name one Supreme Court decision. But he said that the most important issue facing the middle class was ‘as Barack says, a three-letter word: Jobs. J-O-B-S. (Getting jobs can’t be the problem of the middle class as they are middle class due to having jobs). Nobody could match Biden’s blunder at a rally in Missouri, when he called out to State Senator Chuck Graham, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, saying: ‘Stand up Chuck! Let ’em see ya!’

Obama is equally responsible for having such a person without any control on his tongue. The press has long known about the ‘gaffe machine’ Senator from Delaware. Last year, Biden found himself flattering to the liberal establishment after he said of Obama: ‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.’ (Italics mine). Is Obama indeed the first African-American ‘clean’ man? Is he the only nice-looking guy in African-Americans? If this is the observation of Badin, than what is racism? He has committed a racist crime denouncing African-Americans.

Such blunders are not necessarily harmful to a candidate. Voters may even warm to an error-prone politician — it shows a little humanity. Yet there is something disturbing, and strangely inhuman, about Biden and his blundering. For instance, what prompted him, with less than a month to go before Election Day, to guarantee a major threat to American security if Obama were elected? ‘Mark my words,’ said Biden. ‘Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.’

The trouble with Biden is that, for all his folksy populism, he isn’t that popular. His own presidential campaign — the one in which he suggested Obama wasn’t ready to lead America — was a complete flop. During presidential campaign, it looked like at one hand there were McCain and Sarah Palin competing against Obama alone. People could not see and hear Badin even in the microscope. He got the vice presidency as a gift without any struggle. But unlike him, Sarah Palin was very hard working in her campaign. She was the talk of the town with few silly pronouncements. Palin did make mistakes but in my view, Badin can’t be a match to her; he was worse.

Biden displays the very faults that people saw in John McCain. There’s a hot-headedness about him, an anger camouflaged as salt-of-the-earth toughness. Both have endured intense suffering: McCain during his five years as a prisoner of war; Biden after his wife and 13-month-old daughter died in a car accident. One doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to see how such painful experiences might contribute towards the emotional volatility that both men exhibit. Certainly, on foreign policy — supposedly their strong suit — Biden and McCain tend to share the same aggressive impulse: send in troops, whenever, wherever.

Biden is a devout liberal internationalist, committed to using US muscle to make the world a better, more democratic place. He has encouraged American intervention at almost every opportunity, from Kosovo and Baghdad in the past to Darfur and Georgia in the future. He may have opposed the first Gulf war in 1991, he played a key role in ramping up Bill Clinton’s hostility towards the Serbs. He keenly backed the US’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Badin was one of the front-line man agreeing and engineering to wage a war on Iraq. Today, he maintains that he and the American people were misinformed about Iraq. If that’s the case, he has only himself to blame. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, he helped ensure political and public support for the war. During the Senate hearings, his committee failed to consult a single expert who opposed military attacks. Biden pushed for a United Nations agreement, but ultimately he voted for President Bush’s pre-emptive war without UN support. (In fact, as far back as 1998, he had actually called for unilateral action against Iraq: ‘The only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone.’)

Vice president of the US is very important as he can play havoc with the lives of the people around the world. Dick Cheney is a manifestation in this regard. Any goof on this post will be a disaster not only for Americans but for the entire world especially for Pukhtoons of our land. In the last three decades, whatever happens in International Relations, American foreign policy makers focus our Pukhtoon land. World indeed is a global village. Terrorism happens in America and the brunt is borne in Pukhto Zamaka. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Biden said that he had only agreed to be vice-president on the condition that he would be ‘part of the major policy decisions’. Uh-oh! Not again; not another Cheney. After eight years of Dick Cheney, who greatly aggrandised the size and scope of his office and the executive, many Americans and Pukhtoons were hoping the next ‘vice president’ would return to his traditional role: characterised by Benjamin Franklin as ‘Your Superfluous Excellency’. Biden, with his appetite for conflict and gift for the blunder, can hardly be expected to settle for prestigious irrelevance inside the vice-president’s mansion. Let’s hope Badin will not replace the group of neo-cons.

Obama has to rein the vice president to fulfil his dream of hope. For now, we should applaud Barack Obama, not simply for being the first black man elected President of the United States, but for winning an election despite having Joseph Biden on his ticket. Poor Palin lost due to her simple mistakes but Badin won despite blunders in his persona. He must be thankful to Obama. Let’s expect that the American people’s mistake of electing Biden will not be suffered by Pukhtoons again.