No one said it would be easy, but you'd think Obama would get some traction out of having a white guy on the ticket.
Conservatives come out with popguns blazing. Jonah Goldberg criticized the Obama campaign for issuing its cellphone update at 3 am. Michelle Malkin noted that Biden had earlier "said he 'wasn't the guy.' Starting his VP candidacy off with a lie." They'll be getting on his hair plugs soon... UPDATE: As usual I am way behind the curve.
But I'm not the only one: the more general argument that longtime Senator Biden does not represent the sort of "change" represented by the Obama cause is absurd, given that we are in the thick of a campaign already wholly devoted to meaningless symbolism of a more traditional kind -- military cred, elitism, populist blather, etc. Conservatives who have been dunning Obama for portraying himself as an alternative can't seriously believe that choosing an ideologically appropriate running mate from the old school -- instead of, what, a female or Hispanic politician, or someone even more new to politics than Obama -- is a betrayal of anything except the caricature of Obama they've painstakingly crafted. But they've been working with that to good effect lately, so I guess it's worth a try.
Last year I noted that in the Democratic debates Biden was "difficult to follow when he is being genial, but extremely lucid in his bursts of anger" on subjects (mainly in foreign policy) that animate him, and wondered if this were "the kind of behavioral mix voters trust with the football." Certainly Biden is gabby, and we'll see how voters react to his style of discourse now that they have to pay attention to him, more or less, for the next eleven weeks.
Me, I owe Biden a vote for helping to keep the dangerous lunatic Robert Bork off the Supreme Court.
UPDATE. Now here's a new one: Biden "should be named an honorary soldier in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" because he once voted no on a "sense of the Senate" resolution that would have named the IRGC as an official terrorist organization. Also, Biden "threatens a sitting president of the United States with impeachment" and "warns against striking Iran." This appears in the Canada Free Press, so we may consider it an out-of-town tryout for some new right-wing ordnance in case the hair plugs thing doesn't work out.
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