“A Vice-President cannot help you, he can only hurt you.”
-Richard Nixon
This was a Fize.
(more past the link, or beneath the jump)
Picking Joe Biden as the VP is the first seriously wrong move I’ve seen Team Obama make this entire cycle. At one stroke, it undercuts a massive chunk of the Obama theme and opens new lines of attack:
1) It reinforces the idea that Obama needs the Wise Old Men of Washington to provide him with foreign policy support. On the one hand, sure Biden brings all this “experience” to the table, but on the other hand, having somebody around who first ran for President twenty years ago is hardly a good way to sell the topic of change.
2) Biden *did* run for President 20 years ago, where he was famously dinged for ripping off material from a famously inept Labour Party leader in the UK. Sure, “plagarism” starts to sound like “whatever” to anyone outside academia for more than a few years, but come on, he’s from Delaware, where every bloody corporation on Earth is registered and where the politics is famously fever-swamp in caliber. You don’t think there’s going to be all manner of shady stuff to be dredged up? Doesn’t even have to be true, just plausible, and there’s a LOT of plausibility in Delaware.
3) Sure, he punches back, but he also swings wide. Not a great fit for a team defined by their message discipline to this point.
4) The fact that he’s been in the Senate for THIRTY-SIX YEARS sort of puts an end to the sub rosa argument that maybe McCain’s a little too old for this shit. Good luck running him for President in 2016 when he’s older than McCain is now.
5) If you want to get 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, taking one out to be VP may not be the smartest way to go.
I can hear the cries now, “but who then, smartass?” I think Kaine would have been a good pick. I think Sebilus would have been just fine, although I can see how somebody might think that ticket would be a little too “historical” for some parts of the country. I think a real wild card would have been Mike Bloomberg in NYC, who is a Republican in name only but who would have triggered the Magical Unity Pony effect in the press for a while and maybe even undermined the Guiliani strategy.
But Biden is a Fize. For those of you not from the South, this translates to “Fize Obama, I wouldn’t’ve picked that donkey,”
If they lose it, I think history may record they lost it today.