He's #2!

As I suggested before, Biden is a good--but not great--choice. Better than many, but not the best possible. Easily one I and others can and should rally around. Sebelius would have been a much more radical and interesting choice, but Obama went for safe and sound.

Joe Biden is a very familiar figure to me; I've been watching his career for many years.

My first real encounter with him was in 1974, a year after becoming one of the youngest Senators in history. I was with the Hearst Foundation/U.S. Senate Youth Felllowship Program that spring (incredibly notable for the fact that our Hearst hosts had to leave in the middle of our week in Washington, due to the unusual circumstance of having their daughter, Patty, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army).

We "Senate Youth Fellows" had quite a program that week; we saw top representatives of most departments and a number of leading Senators. We were a very demanding group, outraged by the Watergate turmoil and Vietnam War fiasco, both then in their final stages. No Nixon (he was holed up in his bunker) or Kissinger, but I remember Robert Byrd (already old), Walter Mondale (flustered by some of our impudent questions), J. Edgar Hoover, Ted Kennedy, Chuck Percy, Justice Potter Stewart, Speaker Carl Albert, and then-VP Gerald Ford (still the only President I've seen speak live--he didn't say much). The one who made the best impression on us was Biden, and I became a believer, much the same way the young people today flock to Obama.

That was a long time ago, and Biden has been Senator from Delaware for all of it. He drifted away from my political viewpoint later--I think there was some Clintonesque triangulation in the Reagan years. He ran in '88 and fell out badly when his plagiarism from a speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock (one of the most unsuccessful of major British politicians) was uncovered. At some point, he switched his primary Senate Committee assignment from Judiciary (where he was a bit of a Democratic law-and-order type, like Joe Lieberman) to Foreign Affairs, where he has had a resurgence.

I am absolutely certain that he's had enough of the Senate, so this will be a good change for him. That is, if we win.

McCampaign is continuing down the low road, and I see the manipulative side of McCain's efforts ever more clearly through their advertising. Can he sell his maverick role in the midst of massive sell out? Surely, picking Mitt Romney (if he does) will expose his complete surrender to expediency.

The announcement speeches in Springfield were, like the choice of Biden itself, good but not spectacular. The thing I noticed most was when Obama misspoke and initially announced, "The Next President...er The Next Vice President of the United States!"