By Tom Plate
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― There is an obvious symbolic plus for the world in general and Asia in particular in the Joe Biden story. It is that his selection by Sen. Barack Obama as his White House running mate reaffirms the mushrooming sense in the United States that our foreign-policy decisions must be gotten as right as possible.
The implication, therefore, is that the next American President will inherit a world that too clearly reflects ways in which we Americans have gotten things wrong. In these globally integrated times, the price to be paid for major error is steep.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., from the state of Delaware by way of the crustier state of Pennsylvania, may not be the second coming of Henry Kissinger as a grand strategist.
But he is the real deal when it comes to caring about a proper U.S. role in the world. To be sure, he has a bunch of flaws. He tends to talk too much and does give the impression of devoting mountains of time every morning staring in the mirror to check that his senatorial looks and locks haven't faded.
No one's perfect. Biden has served skillfully for years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That makes him a historical figure already. Few people realize that some of the most influential figures in American political history came from that perch.
Those of my generation will most readily recall J. William Fulbright, a Rhodes scholar with the verbal skills of an oral assassin, who from his lofty senatorial perch tortured the Johnson administration over its Vietnam miscalculation.
Going back to 1816, when the position was established, the roster of occupants read like a who's who among U.S. foreign-relations influentials: Clay, Benton, Sumner, Lodge, Borah, Vandenberg, Church, Percy, Lugar, and now Biden.
It is to be regretted, in fact, that Biden will be leaving that more influential foreign-policy position for a chance at the mere vice-presidency. This is an office that, in American football terms, is like that of a backup quarterback.
You stand on the sidelines with the team playbook, but as long as the starter remains healthy, you are little more than a stand-in statue, waiting for number one to take a devastating hit and crumple to the ground.
So it was almost a ghoulish Freudian slip when, in announcing his choice, Obama pivoted dramatically in the direction of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman as they stood on the podium and said: ``So let me introduce to you, the next president [right, that was what Obama said at first, then correcting himself] ― the next vice president of the United States ― Joe Biden."
For those Americans who have had to live through the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy (and the near misses of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan) this oops was hardly a laughing matter. It served to remind us that there are enough psychotic kooks and gun nuts on the landscape to justify a doubling of the U.S. Secret Service budget if the American people were to elect our first black President.
Many Americans, especially women, would have preferred Hillary Clinton in the role of V.P. Obama might have been willing to do that had the former first lady and New York senator been willing to divorce her husband yesterday.
But Obama, as the first major-party minority nominee for the White House, and still a relatively young man in his 40s, has to bear enough weight on his back without having to haul Bill Clinton's bag of sins up Pennsylvania Avenue as well.
Biden, 65, can lighten Obama's load in lots of ways. He is hugely knowledge about South Asia, which until the assassination of Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto last December and the recent resignation of former dictator-president Pervez Musharraf was probably the least reported strategic stretch of Asia in the U.S. mass media.
Understandably, there is enthusiasm in many parts of Asia for Obama's pick. The Times of India, one of the world's greatest English-language newspapers, put it this way, happily: ``A Democratic White House could have a slight Indian accent after presidential candidate Barack Obama chose experienced Delaware senator and foreign policy maven Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate."
The paper continued, ``Biden helped pilot the U.S.-India nuclear deal through Congress and initiated the recent eclipse of military rule in Pakistan. He is generally intimate with Indians and the Indian subcontinent ― an association even Obama claims."
The truth is there aren't more than a small cluster of non-ethnic Indian people in the U.S. who are even aware of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, much less understand it. But Biden does. The six-term senator also understands Asia's importance in terms that extend far beyond its influence on America's cuisine or movie business.
Nonetheless, if Biden were to have remained in hallowed halls of the Clays and Lodges, his foreign-policy legacy would have been assured. Many of Biden's predecessors were more influential, certainly in foreign policy, than the V.P.s of their time.
In effect, Joe Biden had to take a step down if Obama is going to be able to step up. Now all these two have to do is win the November election. Otherwise, it could prove all downhill after that.
Syndicated columnist Tom Plate is on leave from UCLA to write a book on Asia. He has covered several U.S. presidential nominating conventions, for which he was honored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. His email address is platecolumn@gmail.com.