As I recall, I first read the expression "fighting moderate" in a Paul Krugman column sometime in late 2003 or early 2004, applied to Howard Dean, and it instantly struck me as at once insightful and accurate. During the long, long years of Republican political and ideological dominance, any Democrat who questioned the fundamentally Republican-friendly terms in which debates about both foreign and domestic policy and "values" were framed was considered an extremist, regardless of the content and level of popular acceptance of his or her actual policy preferences. Somone with relatively mainstream ideas but with a fighting spirit, i.e. a willingness not just to push for his policies but to shift the very terms of the debates could be immediately described as a radical, while someone with fairly radical ideas but more apologetic about them was considered mainstream or moderate.
In other words, the radical-moderate scale, as applied to Democrats, was meant to capture not the content of one's preferred policies but his or her general attitude towards the prevailing political atmosphere.
Exhibit A in this respect was Dean in 2004: despite being the governor of one of the more liberal states in the union, his record and policies were anything but radical. But he openly stood up to the whole way Republicans framed the issue of national security, the dominant issue of the day, which turned him into a radical. By contrast, it would not be totally implausible to argue that on the whole, John Kerry was somewhat more liberal than Dean policy-wise, but he ran an apologetic campaign that accepted the basic Republican premise about what it means to be "tough" on national security, which rendered him a mainstream candidate.
All too often, these two dimensions of analysis -- policy content and political confrontativeness -- are conflated. The politicians who in the past few years rejuvenated the Democratic Party, Dean and of course Obama, adopt centrist to mainline liberal positions on most issues, but in their different ways they represent a new willingness to fight, to fundamentally shift the terms of the debate. In Obama's case, that's most obvious in the domain of foreign policy, with his cautious but clear and unapologetic embrace of liberal internationalism. This was on clear display earlier during the primaries, when his statement about direct presidential meetings with dictators was treated as a "gaffe", as misspeaking, only to find that he went ahead and fully embraced it and was at least partially vindicated later when even the Bush admin entered into negotiations with Iran. But it is also evident in other areas: although his healthcare plan is less radical than Clinton's/Edwards', he is quite unapologetic about the role of govermnent in his plan and does not let himself bludgeoned by right-wing nonsense about "socialized medicine". (The only clear digression by him from this general fighting spirit came with his FISA vote, which was bad policy as well as bad politics, but that is -- or should have been -- a diary for another day.)
How does Biden fit in this picture? Earlier, I was of two minds about the possibility of a Biden VP-pick. While I liked the guy, I was to some extent persuaded by the reasoning put forward among others by Markos that picking someone to help with a perceived weakness serves only to highlight that weakness. I think that would have been a wholly adequate argument against picking someone like Wesley Clarke, whose only claim to the spot is his military experience (which is not to say that he is a bad guy or could not be a great VP). I always perceived Biden as more well-rounded than that, even though he is primarily known for his foreign policy voice. Yet this was not what convinced me, even before the decision was made, that he would be a great choice. What did it for me is something that Ezra Klein has discussed repeatedly at prospect.org. While in terms of policy Biden is well within the mainstream -- I would locate him somewhere on the continuum between moderate realism and liberal internationalism -- there is something about him that stands out. Most Democrats running for national office intend to reassure voters that they can be trusted when it comes to foreign policy/national security: in other words, they don't want to beat the Republicans, but rather just to achieve a certain comfort level with voters and than pivot to domestic issues.
Not Biden. He wants to destroy them. He ridicules them. He wants to destroy the very notion that Republicans are in a position to set standards for anyone when it comes to foreign policy. Every gesture he makes, every word he utters conveys, very effectively, that the GOP is a miserable failure in those areas. It is not by accident that it was not Obama, not Clinton, not Edwards but Biden who famously hit Giuliani with his noun, verb, 9/11 quip. That episode tells it all. Biden is extremely and unapologetically comfortable and happy to tear down the very idea of Republican national security superiority. Not by insisting that we are tougher than them but by shwoing their policies to be the trainwreck that they are. I wish I could imitate his tone when he said in that debate: "Think about it! Rudy Giuliani!"
So no, Biden was not a safe pick, a pick out of caution or weakness. It was a fighting pick. It was a pick about taking the fight directly to where the GOP thinks it is the strongest. It was about completely redrawing the terms of debate about national security and foreign policy. Again, the proof of this lies not in the novelty or radicalness of Biden's ideas, but in his willingness to fight and his open ridicule of claims of GOP superiority.
Obama knows this. He even tried it himself. When he said earlier that his VP choice will not be dictated by his perceived lack of foreign policy creds, I think he meant it. But for some reason it did not work quite well for him. I guess it was not so much about what was said but more about who said it: he is just not the kind of guy who most Americans are accustomed to as hearing talking about foreign policy, and yes, there was also the race and age factor. It was not his fault but it was his problem. So he listened, learned, and made the right move by picking Joe.
Let me sum up what being a fighting moderate is about with a formula and an example. It is not about "moving to the center" but about moving the center. That's the formula. And here is the example. To simplify, in American foreign policy thinking, the broad center is moderate realism, roughly from the Baker/Lugar/Scrowcroft/Powell crowd in the GOP to the Clinton/Albright etc. folks in the Democratic Party. To the right, there are the neocons and the Buchananite-Paulite isolationists, and to the left there are the liberal internationalists (understood as those whose primary emphasis is on building and strengthening permanent, binding international institutions for dealing with collective problems). In the past several years but especially since 9/11, there was a (more apparent than real) coalition between the realists and the neocons, which made it appear as though liberal internationalism is an isolated fringe view. Although the neocons prevailed, the appareance of a broad realist-neocon coalition was reinforced by two circumstances: 1) the token presence and quite acquiescence of realists within the Bush admin, and 2) the unwillingness of leading realists among the Democrats (yes, I know, among them Joe) to speak out forcefully against the crazies. This created the appearance of a broad consensus, with liberal internationalists outside the mainstream. And it made it look as though the center is somewhere within that illusory consensus, bw. the neocons and the realists--e.g. Condi Rice.
And this is why it is so important not just to argue forcefully for liberal internationalism, but also to seek commong ground, wherever possible, with the more credible voices of moderate realism. Liberal internationalism is unlikely to become anytime soon the majority view, but if there is an enduring coalition of moderate realists and internationalists, as there was from Roosewelt to Carter, then the neocons are shown to be what they are, the true extremist fringe of American foreign policy thinking. I.e., instead of moving to the center, the center is moved.
In three words: Vote Obama/Biden!