Biden and Bayh-ing Their Time In The Veepstakes Spotlight

Over the last couple of days Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) has been picking up lots of Veep buzz. Even so, fellow Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) remains a top pick in the Veepstakes guessing game. Despite the general kinship between the potential nominees and Barack Obama, each candidate has subtle but significant policy differences with the IL senator; Bayh on security and surveillance issues and Biden on bankruptcy.

Let's take a look:

Bayh: Bayh and Obama have remarkably similar records in the Senate, voting together on just fewer than 90% of the votes for which both were present. But Bayh, a member of the Intelligence and Armed Services Cmte, has a conservative streak on intelligence issues that Obama does not share.

Bayh voted to add more spaces for detainees at U.S. detention facilities, while Obama voted against it. The IL senator voted in favor of a defense appropriations bill that pegged U.S. Iraq strategy to a series of “benchmarks” – an approach that ran contrary to the stricter timetable Obama then endorsed.

Most notably, while both he and Obama voted yea on the FISA bill in late June, Bayh voted against an amendment to strike retroactive telecom immunity from the bill – an amendment introduced, in no small part, so Obama could vote for it. The two senators differed on a another wiretapping bill last year, with Bayh voting for expanded telecommunications information gathering and Obama voting against.

Bayh has also been ambivalent about the prosecution of enemy detainees. Both men voted to allow habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo prisoners; to create a mandatory review of detainee cases after 10 years; to ban new military commissions as of 2012; and to force the DCI to disclose information about detainee treatment.

Still, Bayh’s overall record – though it includes a few conservative positions, such as a vote for a constitutional ban on flag-burning – indicates he's really a center-left politician.

Biden: Biden and Obama have even more synchronous records than Bayh and Obama, voting the same way on roughly 94% of floor votes. Biden, however, has shown a very different stance on bankruptcy reform than Obama – or, for that matter, most members of the Democratic Party.

Their chief distinction came on the ’05 Bankruptcy Abuse and Prevention Act – which Obama declared “would take us from a system where judges weed out the abusers from the honest, to a system where all the honest are presumed to be abusers.”

Biden bucked the views of most of his party, not only voting in favor of the bill, but also voting against key amendments from Senate Dems that ended up in Obama’s presidential bankruptcy policy.

Among the proposed amendments were a homestead exemption for bankrupt seniors; means and homestead exemptions for those in financial trouble because of medical expenses; and a set of exemptions for those taking care of sick family members full-time. Leniency for bankrupt seniors and the ill is a central plank in Obama’s bankruptcy reform platform (unveiled in full last month in Powder Springs, GA), and in ’05, he voted for all the proposed amendments.

Biden, however, represents DE, home to many credit card cos. and banks. Biden voted nay on the medical and senior homestead exemptions but abstained on the other two. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

(NICHOLAS TABOR)