What Is This World Coming To?

Barack Obama has named his vice-presidential running mate and I, for one, could not be happier with the Obama-Biden ticket. Senator Joe Biden’s contribution to the Candidate of Change’s campaign will be significant. Like Obama, Biden worked for only a short time in the private sector before entering public ’service’. Biden, 65, won his Senate seat at age 29 and he’s been there ever since.

During the 2006 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the Post’s Dana Milbank wrote this of Biden’s performance:

“Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., in his first 12 minutes of questioning the nominee, managed to get off only one question. Instead, during his 30-minute round of questioning, Biden spoke about his own Irish American roots, his “Grandfather Finnegan,” his son’s application to Princeton (he attended the University of Pennsylvania instead, Biden said), a speech the senator gave on the Princeton campus, the fact that Biden is “not a Princeton fan,” and his views on the eyeglasses of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).”

Joe Biden is a gift from heaven for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, for whom Joe Biden will provide countless quotable quotes. There’s probably not a politician in Washington more enamored of the sound of his own voice than Joe Biden, who once also admitted, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.”

Evidently, the McCain camp was ready for an Obama-Biden ticket and a campaign commercial already in the can for just such an emergency.

It’s not that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. is a lightweight — far from it. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is intimately familiar with the international scene.

But that is the only thing Biden really brings to the table — foreign policy experience — and even then, only after a fashion. As a Senator, Biden knows about foreign policy; he’s never set foreign policy, nor has he had to take responsibility should it fail.

When you are only one out of 100 Senators, there is always somebody else to point fingers at.

Obama’s choice of Joe Biden is yet another example of just how desperate Obama is becoming. Biden brings experience to the ticket, but in the process, demolishes the whole “change” message that gave Obama the edge — Biden’s been in the Senate since Obama was an Indonesian schoolboy.

And Biden brings as much baggage as he does experience — Biden’s previous presidential bids exploded spectacularly — especially his 1988 campaign in which he was caught plagiarizing speeches from British politician Neal Kinnock.

It was Joe Biden who made headlines and ruffled the feathers of folks like Reverend Jeremiah Wright by praising Obama to the New York Observer as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy“.

My favorite Biden quote was this one, as Biden was kicking off his latest run at the White House:

“In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

Obama-Biden — the GOP Dream Ticket.