BIDEN'S WARNING OF A NATION-SHAKING EVENT IN THE FUTURE

A mystery has revealed itself to our eyes, and it is the concluding portion of US Senator Biden's warning to an audience about an unsettling prediction of testing of the next president. Here is the entire text taken from Alexander Cockburn's piece on CounterPunch posted this weekend.

=====

"Mark my words," Biden said solemnly at a Seattle fundraiser last Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden went on. He mentioned the Middle East and Russia. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.”

What exactly is Biden hinting at in that last sentence? From the context of that whole paragraph it’s clear enough to me he’s suggesting that despite hopes nourished by the sort of people at that Seattle fundraiser that post-Bush/Cheney America might backpeddle from hasty military confrontations, President Obama will stand tall and lose no time in going eyeball to eyeball with those who would test his resolve.

http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn10242008.html

=====

My friends and I have considered all kinds of situations in which a new president might need local community leaders to follow him blindly in some new policy, and the only thing we can conceive of that would be nation-shaking, and which couldn't be done without lots of local support, would be the re-introduction of the draft. Canada has already signaled its willingness to reject young diverse white Americans fleeing from a draft (along with other young Americans), so the easy escape is blocked.

It is hard to believe that contemporary American college students are more eager to be cut up, shot, and killed in 2009 than they were in Johnson's Vietnam.

If a President Obama has a foreign policy initiative that makes Bush's international interventions look tiny, it would require a massive army and navy which would require a draft of unprecedented proportions with a correspondingly great outburst of protest.

=====

Any other ideas of substantive policy initiatives that couldn't be implemented with only the powers in the presidency and the Congress --- initiatives that would require wide-ranging local public support?