Saturday, August 23, 2008

Biden Time

I've had a fan request for a post on Biden.

Sorry, Christine, to relegate you to mere fan status, but I needed a pick-me-up after last night. More on that next.

Obama picked Biden. Fact.

By the way, has anyone actually received "the text" yet? I'm typing this at 8:50 Eastern and I haven't received one.

As for the choice itself, I think it was a good one. I'm not sure if it was the best one. I would have liked to see Virginia's Warner selected, but that's been off the table for a while.

In the last couple weeks I've been slouching toward a Gomorrah-like rationalization of putting Clinton on the ticket, saying things like winning with her is better than losing without her, and that the Hill-Bill tandem could bring just the level of dirty politics that Obama needs to deal with McCain's ruthlessness. I'm happy on a principled level that Obama seems to have avoided making the deal with the devil(s) that I was suddenly so willing to make, though if he loses the election by an Ohio or Virginia, I'm gonna be upset.

As for Biden, I think he's a good guy. He's smart, engaged, funny. People say he puts his foot in his mouth a lot, but that's just the media caricature. Seriously, no one in the Senate has foot-in-mouth disease as bad as John McCain, but the media doesn't cover it that way.

Hopefully they will finally start to, and I think a combination of his histrionic negativity as well as the "I don't know how many houses I have" gaffe will cause the MSM to start doing so, but that's for another time.

I honestly need to do a bit more thinking about why I like Biden, but for now check out David Brooks's pro-Biden op-ed from yesterday. He does a great job of introducing the candidate to the larger population, and I think (hope) his rise from humble roots and tragedy will resonate.

Amazingly enough (though maybe we should stop be amazed by these scumbags), McCain already has an anti-Biden ad out.

Who does that? Who releases negative ads about the VP mere hours after the person has been chosen and before they've even appeared in public with the presumptive nominee?

John McCain, that's who. I am shocked people are supporting this guy. His entire campaign is "look at all these half-ass bad things I can make up about Obama." One-half of our country is suffering from massive delusions.

1 comment:

Christine Borne said...

No, that's cool, I'm a fan. You're the resident political science expert in the Ohio City blogosphere.

I admittedly don't know a thing about Biden. I'll have to learn.

I will admit that I was still nursing a fairytale half-hope that he'd pick Ralph Nader, just so he couldn't blame it on Nader if he lost the election. Or, equally unrealistically, the governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer. I lived in Montana when Brian Schweitzer arose from obscurity like some cattle-ranching Luke Skywalker to (almost) vanquish Conrad Burns in the Senate race. I'd never seen anything like it, the way folks took a shine to him and his campaign slogan, "Plain Talk. Good Ideas." It was like a premonition of the "Obamessiah."