As the name of Joe Biden was bandied about in the past few weeks, and then when he became the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, I kept getting him confused in my mind with Richard Lugar. Lugar was my Senator in Indiana, and is one of the most well-reasoned voices regarding foreign policy in the federal government. So, it took me a while to figure out why I was confusing one of my favorite Republicans with Biden, the Democratic Senator from Delaware.
Then it dawned on me.
Biden and Lugar have been the chairs of the Foreign Relations Committee for years -- sometimes one is the chair, and sometimes the other, depending on which party is ascendant. During the past eight years, their committee has often been the only sane voice coming out of Washington (particularly regarding Iraq), and the two chairs have worked hard to make it a truly bipartisan committee. In the build up to the war, they were the ones asking the question the Bush Administration continually ignored: "Do we have a plan for what we'll do after the invasion?"
I could think of worse people to be advising Barack Obama on foreign policy than Richard Lugar's bipartisan partner, Joe Biden.