Obama’s VP short-list: Bayh-bayh progressive hopes

It seems to me that any talk of Obama's potential VP picks is mostly mindless speculation, but our mainstream media, in all their inherent wisdom, has drained the pool down to two "short-list" contenders for the VP slot: Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA). Thankfully, Sam Nunn, who, just so you know, THINKS IT IS SICK TO MAKE A STRAIGHT NAVAL MAN SHARE A SUBMARINE WITH A GAY NAVAL MAN, is quickly fading from VP speculation, (at least this week), but Joan Walsh at Salon makes clear what an awful disappointment both these men would be should Obama choose one. Here she is on Bayh: Bayh is viewed as having foreign policy credentials, but to my mind, they're mostly bad. I vividly remember his heinous argument for why Democrats had to support the Iraq war in October 2002: "The majority of the American people tend to trust the Republican Party more on issues involving national security and defense than they do the Democratic Party," he told Fox News back then. "We need to work to improve our image on that score by taking a more aggressive posture with regard to Iraq, empowering the president." And here she is on Kaine: Kaine creates comparable problems for Obama with the Democratic base when it comes to the issue of abortion. A Roman Catholic, he is antiabortion, though he says he prefers expanding women's access to contraception and healthcare over criminalizing them and their doctors (though he does support a late-term abortion ban, as does Bayh). Given that one of Obama's top arguments to lure fence-sitting female Hillary Clinton supporters has been John McCain's antichoice stance, both Kaine and Bayh would seem to hurt Obama on that score. It's truly amazing to me the way progressives fought tooth and nail to defeat who we thought was a triangulating, narcissistic, politically-motivated centrist only to nominate a triangulating, narcissistic, politically-motivated centrist. Makes my head spin.