Well played. Obama picked a white guy, as I expected, but a sitting Senator with no executive branch experience, which I didn't. Joe's been in the Senate for decades and has been trying to get to the White House for almost as long, so this is a good opportunity for him. Delaware's governor is a Dem, so we don't lose a seat. (Dodd moves up to the chairmanship of Foreign Relations Committee, which ain't bad.) The Villagers like him, so they feel good about having him around as backup quarterback in case something, um, unexpected happens to Obama.
Joe's been playing attack dog and doing a good job of it recently. This frees up Obama to remain the sunny, optimistic one. It also blunts the attack on Obama's perceived "weakness" (read: being a Democrat) that the Republicans always make against anyone who isn't in favor of invading every country everywhere at all times. This takes a major weapon out of McCain's arsenal.
Also, Joe is known and well-liked in the Philadelphia media market, and he was raised in Scranton. He's also a Catholic. That means he'll do well in the Philly suburbs and up into northwestern PA. This improves Obama's chances in PA and in general with Catholics, who are supposedly the only swing vote out there.
Finally, Biden doesn't offer McCain an easy "so there!" VP pick in response. If Obama had picked Kaine (as I had expected), McCain could have picked a pro-choice Republican like Tom Ridge to break off independent women. If Obama had picked an anti-choice VP, McCain/Ridge would have been trouble for us in PA.
I am curious now who McCain will pick. My guess is Lieberman, because it allows him to paint himself as reaching across party lines to bring in a moderate (two lies, but that's politics). It might also be a CEO type, from outside of the political class, but that's riskier. I don't think he can go with an ethnic minority, because McCain's only intrinsic advantage in the race is that he's the white guy, and he can't throw that away. It could be a woman. Booman has convinced me it can't be some generic social conservative, because nothing McCain can do will cause more of those types to vote for him and in any case culture war themes aren't playing so well anymore with independents.
I hope he does pick Lieberman.
Posted by: bridget | August 23, 2008 at 12:54 PM