OBAMA-BIDEN: INEXPERIENCE + BAD JUDGMENT

One wonders how Sen. Joe Biden can talk so much with his foot in his mouth.

"We're not supporting clean coal," the Democratic vice presidential candidate said while campaigning in Ohio last week.  "No coal plants here in America."

Coal mining is an important industry in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, all tightly contested states in this election, so Sen. Biden's remarks were impolitic.  Especially so since Sen. Obama supports clean coal technologies.

"Obama's Department of Energy will enter into public-private partnerships to develop five 'first of a kind' commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology," the Obama-Biden campaign Web site says.

Sen. Obama's efforts Tuesday to depict Sen. John McCain as too quick to oppose a federal bailout of insurer AIG were undermined when he was reminded by NBC's Matt Lauer that Sen. Biden had said the same thing on the same day.

"I thought it was terrible," Sen. Biden told CBS news anchor Katie Couric in an interview broadcast Monday.  "If I had anything to do with it, we never would have done it."

Sen. Biden was referring to an Obama ad that mocked Sen. McCain as an out of touch old fogy because he doesn't use a computer.

The ad was terrible. (Sen. McCain doesn't use a computer because his war injuries prevent him from typing on a keyboard).  And it testifies to Sen. Biden's basic decency that he thought so.  But there are some opinions you just don't voice.

In the same interview, Sen. Biden told Ms. Couric: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed.  He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

Franklin Roosevelt didn't become president until three years after the stock market crashed in 1929.  Television didn't go into widespread commercial use until years after FDR died in 1945.

Sen. Biden has said something foolish or indiscreet so often the Republican National Committee has started a "Biden Gaffe Clock" to chronicle them all.  

Sen. Biden wasn't chosen to provide comic relief.  Sen. Obama thought his 35 years in the Senate, most of it on the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is now chairman, would give the ticket foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama himself lacks.

The most hypocritical of the legion of double standards employed by the news media in this campaign is that a paucity of experience in foreign policy is considered disqualifying in the Republican candidate for vice president, but inconsequential in the Democratic candidate for president.  

Sarah Palin's only claim to experience in national security policy is that as governor of Alaska, she's head of the state's National Guard, and she has a son in the Army.  That's mighty thin gruel.  But it's more national security experience than Sen. Obama has had.

If you think inexperience in foreign policy is a bad thing to have a heartbeat away from the presidency, why is it acceptable to put inexperience directly behind the desk in the Oval Office?

Gov. Palin has been in public life longer than Sen. Obama.  She served four years on the city council in Wasilla, eight years as that town's mayor, a year as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and the last 22 months as governor of Alaska.

Sen. Obama served eight years in the Illinois legislature and a little less than four in the U.S. Senate, of which he's spent most of the last two running for president.

All but four years of Gov. Palin's public career has been spent in the executive branch.  Sen. Obama has no experience in the executive branch, nor any private sector managerial experience except for his role in the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, about which he is reluctant to talk because it brings up his association with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayres.

As mayor, Sarah Palin managed explosive growth in Wasilla while cutting property tax rates 40 percent.  As governor, she worked out a deal to build a natural gas pipeline to the lower 48 that her predecessors had been trying, and failing, to do for 35 years.

Sen. Obama's tenure in the Illinois legislature was noted chiefly for his having voted "present" a remarkable 130 times.  His brief time in the U.S. Senate has been devoid of significant accomplishment.

Sen. Obama argues judgment is more important than experience, and Sen. Biden is living proof that experience without judgment is not a pretty thing.

The most important decision Sen. Obama has had to make as a presidential candidate was his selection of a running mate.  He chose Sen. Biden.  Inexperience and bad judgment is the worst combination of all.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.