Link: Obama Picks Biden, Adding Foreign Expertise to Ticket - NYTimes.com.
Link: Biden adds experience and signals tough line | Politics | Reuters.
Link: Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket - International Herald Tribune.
Link: Analysis: Biden fills attack role - Yahoo! News.
OK, so as I was rooting for Hillary to get VP, and had some SERIOUS doubts about some of the NO-NAMES that were being floated as supposedly viable alternatives to Senator Clinton, Obama managed to pick the ONE PERSON I really learned to admire more than before during this primary season (I already admired Hillary, and enjoyed watching her soar).
Joe Biden had some of THE best one-liners of the primary season, not just good lines, but HE SAID the things Kucinich should have been saying, and more succinctly and directly on target. Hell, I'd love him forever just for the memorable line that basically destroyed Rudi Giuliani as a candidate (paraphrasing: that Giuliani's every other statement included three words: a noun, a verb, and 9/11).
I was absolutely certain he would be Secretary of State on ANY ticket, and I'm a little worried that he won't be running the State Dept. I hate how (BEFORE CHENEY) there is a long tradition of sticking the VP in a closet, as happened with Al Gore.
But that's what you get when the VP is a re-purposed Primary Season rival, a potential threat, as was wonderfully illustrated in The West Wing TV program (by the guy who was in Animal House, no less!). I'm not entirely certain Biden would make another run for president, but he's unorthodox enough, I would not rule it out, nor begrudge it of him. 65 is not old, but this run gives him another option for his political sunset, as finishing your career as an elder statesman confers longer usefulness and higher stature than hanging on as the most senior senior in the Senate. Just ask Ted Stevens, since Strom Thurmond is no longer around to have controversial birthdays.
Biden's experience makes me relax a bit on this ticket as only Hillary could have, because he's been around and around the block on the Foreign Relations committee, and I've WATCHED him in that role, I actually paid attention to what he was up to for a lot of that time. The pity is, he was wasted there during the Bush Administration, just as surely as Colin Powell was wasted at the State Dept. I have no reservations about the quality of Biden's advice and work in that arena, and fully expect it to be smarter than Obama all around.
Wonder who will get the State Dept then, tho? Wish you could give it to the VP. But I also feel relaxed should he have to take over the presidency in a crisis as well, because of his foreign policy experience (as I would have with Hillary as well, it goes without saying, since I wanted her for president).
He was on Judiciary too, so he also will be well-armed to help overhaul the mess that is the Justice Dept. as well. That's a job he could be given as VP: to help a new Attorney General clean house.
I'd rather see him clean house at State first, and then Justice. State isn't in as bad of shape, but the Bush Administration foreign policy positions did the damage, not rampant corruption and cronyism, as at Justice (at the behest of the White House), which has now lost all credibility as an independent office.
But the thing I MOST look forward to is Biden's mouth, on the campaign trail, as official Attack Dog, as bad cop to Obama's way-too-cool-and-boring-Kumbayah-singing cop. Yeah, I want to see somebody REALLY mix it up with the GOP, all their army of attack poodles and slanderers and Lee Atwater plumber wannabees.
There is a risk there, unleashing Biden's mouth. On domestic stuff, sometimes he gets the foot-in-mouth problem, but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that he tends to say what he thinks too often, without putting that creepy politician editor widget between his brain and mouth.
Who can fault a person for that?
In the land of Xena: Warrior Princess, the sheer joy was watching the New Zealand folks, and especially Lucy Lawless, interacting with the press. The US audience was SO enculturated to the PR image consultant-driven, overly-careful stars who rarely said anything that wasn't bland and forgettable. Lucy Lawless showed up, accidentally flashed her boob while singing the national anthem at a hockey game, held her head up unashamed, and would say whatever the hell she felt like saying. Now carefully ensconced in the US, Lawless acts as careful and less raw as most US celebrities, and is about as interesting, unfortunately. Back in the beginning, tho, she was a breath of fresh air.
So Biden, after all these years (and that awful plagiarism thing, long behind him, I hope), still has part of his mouth directly connected to his brain, often bypassing the talk-like-a-careful-politician governor. That's a double-edged sword, but I didn't see the downside of the double edge during the primary season as often as I expected to.
Instead I saw a happy warrior, itchy to take on these know-nothing image massagers of the GOP, ready to rhetorically call out Karl Rove et. al. and give them what for. It was a sad day when he left the primaries, and until Hillary and Obama got their danders up and quit singing Kumbayah themselves, I worried all heat and light had gone out of the primaries.
So Biden is back, and he's got some good targets to gun for! You won't need coffee to stay up for the debates! Let's get ready to rumble!
Go Joe!
Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket
Saturday, August 23, 2008WASHINGTON: Joe Biden has lived a life of second chances, a cycle that's been cruel and redemptive by turns. Now he's starting over once again.
Deeply private yet in-your-face, collegial yet ideological, the Delaware senator brings a wealth of foreign policy experience to Barack Obama's Democratic ticket, plus wisdom in the ways of Washington and an infectious enthusiasm for political donnybrooks.
He adds suspense, too, over the question of when not if he'll put his foot in his mouth. Biden's agile mind comes with a loose tongue that cannot always be properly restrained.
Back in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., Biden's Catholic schoolmates nicknamed him Dash because he stuttered so much his speech sounded like Morse Code. Biden overcame that rip at his confidence, smoothed his talk and doesn't seem to have quieted down since.
The strongest sign that Obama was seriously considering Biden for his running mate, despite some differences over national security, energy and more in their voting records, was Biden's odd absence from the public in recent days. Normally he's a sucker for a microphone.
And it was a sign of those Washington ways that when he told reporters, "I'm not the guy,' no one believed him, just as no one believed him when he said of the vice presidential slot last year, "I would not accept it if anyone offered it to me."
That's how people talk in politics a different sort of telegraphing code. And after more than a third of a century in Washington, and two short-lived presidential campaigns of his own, Biden has it down pat.
He came to Washington as a wunderkind, elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29 the earliest possible age and just meeting the rule that one must be 30 when sworn in. The knock against him used to be that he was more sizzle than steak, articulate but perhaps not all that deep.
At age 65, as a party elder and veteran of titanic judicial nomination struggles, world crises and legislative dealmaking, that rap has faded.
His hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are historical soliloquies on the fly, complete with grace notes liberally dispensed to colleagues and witnesses of any political persuasion, humor often directed at himself and sharp-tongued fulmination over what he sees as the failures of the Bush administration.
His first presidential campaign, in 1987, was a "train wreck" by his own description, one of those times that forced him to pick up pieces and start anew.
He'd lifted lines from a British politician, exaggerated his academic achievements when boasting about his smarts to a voter who challenged him ("I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden recalls saying) and suffered horrendous headaches that turned out to be life-threatening brain aneurisms that kept him out of the Senate for seven months.
"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate," he writes in his memoirs. And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes not even close.
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