WASHINGTON - In picking six-term Senator Joseph Biden as his vice presidential
running-mate, Senator Barack Obama hopes to plug some key gaps in the electoral
constituencies whose support he hopes will send him to the White House in
November. And if Biden's wide smile and vigorous hand-shaking at Monday's
opening of the Democratic Party's national convention in Denver is any measure,
he's happy to be along for the ride.
Obama, who will be formally nominated as the Democrats' presidential candidate
at the national party convention in Denver
this week, desperately needs to plug those gaps given the steady slippage in
the public opinion polls that he has suffered over the past month.
While he remains slightly ahead of Senator John McCain in most polls, the gaps
have been largely within the statistical margins of error, while the Republican
has been making solid gains in specific "swing" states that are likely to be
critical to the election's outcome.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - a position that he has
held twice before as well - Biden's presence on the ticket is aimed at
reassuring those voters who are concerned about Obama's inexperience in that
area. Indeed, Biden's selection was tipped off earlier this week in part by
Obama's decision to send him to Georgia for an on-site inspection of the latest
global hotspot.
Similarly, at nearly 66 years old, and with a formidable mane of white hair and
some 35 years in the Senate, Biden is likely to attract older voters whose
turnout in elections has traditionally been higher than other demographic
groups and who have shown the greatest uneasiness about Obama as president and
his "change" agenda.
As a Catholic with white working-class roots, Biden will also appeal to two
other key Democratic constituencies that have too-often strayed from the
party's ranks in national elections over the past 30 years and that have strong
reservations about Obama's candidacy, generally preferring Senator Hillary
Clinton in this year's primary elections by significant margins.
Finally, Biden is plain-speaking and unusually direct - if sometimes overly
loquacious - particularly when he is on the attack, a stance which makes him an
excellent complement to a presidential candidate whose soaring rhetoric has
been consistently positive, designed to inspire rather than denigrate.
"I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004," Biden said after Obama
clinched the Democratic nomination, when the first indications that Republicans
were planning a campaign of unrelenting negative attacks on Obama's alleged
softness or naivete on national security of the kind that worked so tellingly
on behalf of George W Bush against former vice president Al Gore and Senator
John Kerry.
"This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in
modern history - maybe ever," he declared in what may have been a preview of
his main point of attack on Republican candidate Senator John McCain and his
staunch support for Bush's hawkish and unilateralist foreign policies over the
last seven and a half years.
"Rather than whine about how mean Republicans are when they hit [Democrats] on
national security, as so many Democrats do, Biden has a real talent for
responding with an appropriate mixture of mockery and contempt," wrote Greg
Sargent, a blogger on the influential www.talkingpointsmemo.com website.
"Biden's charisma and authority on the subject add a ton of firepower to
Obama's arsenal in this regard, allowing Biden to act as an extremely credible
voice to deliver the message that the [Republican] approach to foreign policy
in the 21st century has been a sad, sick joke."
But whether Biden's selection will help restore momentum to the Obama campaign
as it heads to the Denver convention remains unclear.
The selection is sure to disappoint some Democrats who had hoped that Obama
would see his way to choosing Clinton - hopes that had been fueled by the
apparent delay in announcing the choice which had originally been expected
early last week. However, it also reassured some activists who were worried
that Obama would opt for a right-wing Democrat associated with the hawkish
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), such as Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, one
of the names on the shortlist of candidates known to have been under
consideration.
In many ways, Biden marks an unconventional choice. Traditionally, Democrats,
in particular, have sought balance in their national tickets - either
geographically, by choosing a northerner and a southerner (such as Georgia's
Jimmy Carter and Minnesota's Walter Mondale or, more recently, Massachusetts'
John Kerry and North Carolina's John Edwards), or ideologically, by choosing a
liberal and a conservative.
In this case, however, Biden, like Obama, hails from the more-liberal wing of
the party, and both are from the industrial northeastern third of the country -
Obama from Chicago, and Biden from the tiny mid-Atlantic state of Delaware,
although he is a native of Delaware's much larger neighbor, Pennsylvania, which
is widely considered among the three or four most critical "swing" states that
could decide the election outcome.
The fact that Obama chose Biden strongly suggests that he believes his
electoral fortunes rest on wooing white, working class voters that proved so
elusive to him during the primary elections, the so-called "Reagan Democrats"
who have been key to Republican victories since 1980 and who flocked to
Clinton's banner in most of the primary elections. Many of them live in the
so-called "Rust Belt" states of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New
Jersey that stretch from Obama's Chicago to Delaware's coast.
"Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, have trouble connecting with
working-class voters, especially Catholic ones," wrote the neo-conservative New
York Times columnist David Brooks this week in a remarkably favorable profile
of the presumptive vice presidential nominee. "Biden would be the bridge."
Obama has fallen behind McCain among Catholic voters, according to the most
recent surveys.
On his strong point, foreign policy, Biden, like Clinton, voted in favor of the
October 2002 resolution that authorized the use of force against Iraq's Saddam
Hussein. Unlike Clinton, however, Biden both repeatedly cautioned against going
to war until UN inspectors completed their work in the run-up to the 2003
invasion and later admitted that he regretted his vote.
He has since been a staunch critic of the war, arguing over the past year that
Afghanistan and Pakistan, rather than Iraq (whose effective partition he
advocated until recently), constituted the "central front" in the war on
terror, a position adopted by Obama himself.
He has been an unapologetic backer of the United Nations and multilateral
institutions in general, along with the former chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Republican Richard Lugar, with whom he has long enjoyed a
close working relationship.
Biden has himself sought the presidency twice. He was leading contender for the
Democratic nomination in 1988 until he was caught plagiarizing a speech by
British Labor leader Neil Kinnock and subsequently dropped out of the race. He
also ran for the nomination this year but dropped out after a fifth-place
showing in the earliest caucus despite a strong showing in several debates.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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