Well, despite some excited reports last night of Obama-Bayh ‘08 buttons and bumper stickers, it has been announced that Obama has picked Joe Biden as his running mate (via CNN): Obama-Biden ticket ready to debut.
The official Obama campaign e-mail states:
Friend –I have some important news that I want to make official.
I’ve chosen Joe Biden to be my running mate.
Joe and I will appear for the first time as running mates this afternoon in Springfield, Illinois — the same place this campaign began more than 19 months ago.
I had noted a good pick of speculation last weekend on various Sunday shows that Biden would be the guy, but I honestly didn’t believe it. At a minimum, Biden likes to talk and often says things that get him into trouble (the whole “articulate”/”clean” business and the “Indian accents” bit both come to mind). Those types of sound bites will certainly be exploited (along with things like the plagiarism problem he had back in the 1988 campaign) by the McCain campaign and associated groups. However, none of those are going to be death blows.
My sense is that Biden was picked specifically because of his foreign policy expertise, which addresses Obama’s key perceived weakness (and McCain’s main perceived strength). It also means that despite the one bad poll this week, that the Obama campaign didn’t panic and didn’t take the ill-advised suggestion in some quarters that he would have to pick Hillary Clinton to jump-start his campaign.
If you are looking for a round-up of early response, check out James Joyner and for a lot of posts on the subject, cruise over to The Moderate Voice (just click ‘n scroll).
And btw, is the earliness of the announcement yet another example of Democratic Party east coast bias?
Sphere: Related Content
Filed under: 2008 Campaign, US Politics | |1 Comment
el pt RSS feed for comments on this post.
The trackback url for this post is: http://poliblogger.com/wp-trackback.html?p=14053
NOTE: I will delete any TrackBacks that do not actually link and refer to this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
[...] Amaze (+Video Evidence of His Foot-in-Mouth Problems) which includes two video clips, including the aforementioned one about Indian-Americans (it originally had three clips, but one is not longer available, and I [...]
Pingback by PoliBlog (TM): A Rough Draft of my Thoughts » A Trip to my Archives (Biden and his Foot-in-Mouth Problems) — Saturday, August 23, 2024 @ 12:06 pm