Biden
It's a safe choice, a playing-not-to-lose choice, but still not too bad. Biden won't be bad at the bulldog role and is well situated to go after McCain. It's likely that average voters couldn't even tell you the difference between executive and legislative experience, so it probably was wiser for Obama to plug a different resumé gap with this selection. Now, at most, the two tickets will have one person with executive experience, and it will be interesting to see how McCain and others pay attention to that concern.
It makes sense for Obama not to rock the boat with his selection, since the swing voters he must court already find it peculiar enough to see a 46-year-old black man at the top of the ticket. It wouldn't have worked well in this situation to choose, for example, a nationally-unknown woman (and they all are nationally unknown with one exception who would have been an insane choice for other reasons). Obama has all kinds of unique challenges as to how he pitches himself for the rest of the race. Choosing Biden is one more way this candidate is coming down to earth for what will be very recognizable as a standard-issue stretch run. I would not put this selection in the same league with the only two inspired running-mate choices of the last quarter century: Gore and, yes, Cheney.
A lot of what Biden brings to an Obama administration could be secured by making him Secretary of State. It would be interesting to know how much the Obama camp considered an economy-centered choice for running mate, and how much the brushfire in Georgia—something of a blip, really—swayed the final choice. Any "home run" (or "swing for the fences") choice would have been an "economy" choice. Bloomberg, for example. Jon Corzine would have been quite an interesting choice in a parallel universe where he wore his seatbelt and didn't have a messy personal life (and where Wall Street experience didn't impute complicity in the mortgage/credit mess).
A final note, the text message thing was a complete bust, even in terms of what the expectations should have been that were dashed. The media consistently called them "text messages", but when I visited the Obama site and filled out the "be the first to know" page, all they asked for was an email address. In any event, my email arrived at 7:34 a.m.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Obama-Biden 2008
posted at 10:36 AM
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