What does the selection of Joe Biden to be Barack Obama’s US Vice-President candidate tell us about the state of Obama’s campaign and where it is headed?
Joe Biden is a long-time white male senator in his mid-60s from the East coast with two previous Presidential bids behind him. It’s certainly not a choice based on reinforcing Obama’s message of change: white male senators are hardly a novelty in US politics, especially Presidential politics, and the selection continues the overwhelming Democrat preference for picks from the eastern third of the US. Oh, and did I mention that he’s also one of the longest-serving senators?
In all those respects, Biden is as much ‘Democrat politics as usual’ as you can get. He’s not a candidate of change.
What he does though bring is long years of foreign policy experience, including currently chairing the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In that respect, he is a good fit for for Obama, but it’s a very defensive choice.
Selecting someone to offset your weaknesses can work electorally (think Dick Cheney) but there’s none of the mold-breaking ambition shown by, for example, Bill Clinton in 1992 when by selecting a fellow southerner in Al Gore to be his running mate he dramatically reinforced the message about being a different sort of Democrat.
It’s also a risky choice given that so much of the recent Democrat electoral successes has been driven by opposition to the Iraq war, yet Biden voted for the war, has consistently supported it and has called for more troops to be deployed. In his defence, he did also attempt to give diplomacy one last opportunity to work before the invasion and has called for stronger international collaboration.
Biden has also recently gone on record criticising Obama as being “not yet ready” to be President. That’s a quote likely to be very regularly wheeled out to reinforce McCain’s attacks on Obama’s lack of experience. (UPDATE: The quote has already featured in a McCain TV advert that was released very promptly which you can watch here.)
On the other hand, Biden does have a very punchy style of political debate that should make him well suited for the ‘attack dog’ role often taken up by running mates. (This blog posting over on MyDD sets out clearly the case for Biden being a good, if cautious, choice based on this and similar factors.)
The overall caution of the selection most likely reflects the fact that for all the Obama buzz, he has held only a small polling lead over McCain and he and his campaign have decided that the only way to move forward with confidence is to start addressing some of Obama’s weaknesses.
One footnote: for all the Obama campaign rhetoric about putting its supporters at the centre of the campaign and how it would tell them first via text message who was to be the Vice-President pick, in reality the media ran the story first and the text message notifications went out late, rushed and at a poor time (around 3am East Coast). It’s a rare stumble from the Obama campaign, and one that will most likely quickly be forgotten as the Democratic Convention starts, but a reminder that even the Obama campaign is human.
UPDATE: The other aspect of the stumble is that having hyped the selection so much in advance, ending up with a conventional, cautious selection has left rather a sense of anti-climax. The technical tactics have been out of kilter with the campaign strategy:
“There was too much build-up for Biden,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “He lacks a ‘wow’ factor. I don’t think anybody is bowled over after all this drama. And to have a text message go out and disturb many people in the middle of the night?” (Politics Magazine)
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27 Comments
Well I think the campaign is making a huge mistake and they are becoming chronic….i think in trying to appear less radical the campaign is losing it’s defining momentum….and McCain is starting to edge ahead…
Maybe their are some hicks out there in the sticks who thinks it shows solidarity with Georgia against the Russkies….:-))
The Democrats have made the wrong choice for President and now he has made the wrong choice for VP. So we will get Mr Chips, another Republican nutter in the White House.
One really has to ask. Is electing the American President far too important for Americans to be allowed to vote? McCain and Putin. Time to start building Anderson Shelters again?
Seriously, the comparison Mark makes is with Clinton-Gore, but Obama is much less experienced as a one term senator than Clinton in ’92, who had executive exoerience as a two term Governor, albeit in the small state of Akansas.
This is more like John F Kennedy – Lyndon Johnson – a young candidate for change balancing his ticket with a southern conservative. (Lets hope it doesn’t ultimately does not turn out the same way – with the VP taking over after the assassination of the POTUS).
Obama has blown it. Look at Electoral-vote.com and the polls are moving against him.
I think we are asking the wrong questions. Did Obama have any choice? Might not Biden have been forced upon him? In the same way that Johnson was forced upon Kennedy? The elite needs its insurance policy. If McCain loses, they need a substitute puppet running the show. And that will be Biden, not Obama. If Obama had refused to take Biden, he might now be facing the assassin’s bullet.
“This is more like John F Kennedy – Lyndon Johnson – a young candidate for change balancing his ticket with a southern conservative.”
LBJ may have been more progressive than JFK though. But for Vietnam, I’m always quite amazed how good LBJs record was. Of course that is a pretty damn enormous but!
I think Obama has lost the plot and probably the election with this choice.
He’s either for change or he isn’t, he either makes a virtue of his inexperience or he doesn’t and he is either different or he is the same.
With this choice he dilutes all his positives and throws light on his negatives. Put your money on the the GOP who have chewed up and spat out much better tickets than this one.
Having watched the official announcement speech in full, and read a lot of good and bad commentary on this, Obama made a very good choice. Biden accentuates McCain’s weaknesses, on foreign policy and the extremely rich, disconnected from the average American. Any choice McCain makes to counters Biden’s background, he loses on experience.
Biden makes clear how poor a candidate McCain is, closing up Obama’s perceived weaknesses. As usual reading the posts of the concern trolls on libdemvoice, I wonder how much they’ve actually investigated and how much is just plain old trolling. It’s incredibly easy to find the facts that make them look not just stupid & ignorant, but plain wrong.
Someone with bags of experience backing up a neophyte Leader. Reminds me of a situation a little nearer home!
Rich, it isn’t trolling, it’s people disagreeing with your analysis. I don’t have an opinion about Biden, by the way, but I have always thought that McCain would win – but then I’ve been an active Liberal for more than 40 years and that tends to set the default at pessimism!
I think we’re right to be sceptical of Obama’s progressive credentials in any case. It seems that his campaign to secure the nomination was all about giving the impression he was a liberal, but now the crunch comes all of this is wiped quietly away and the tacking back to the centre/right begins and will continuing until election day.
Mark, don’t you think the media narrative of “Biden choice reinforces Obama weakness on foreign policy” is rather lazy and unnuanced?
If you look at it from another point of view, Biden is rather a risky choice – he is an exciting speaker with a flair for capturing the public’s attention (such as his devastating summing up of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign as “noun, verb, 9/11”) but also has a habit of opening his mouth at the wrong moment and saying entirely the wrong things.
I very much doubt the Obama campaign made its choice based on the idea that Biden “plugs a foreign policy hole” in the ticket. If there was some calculation involved it could have something more to do with Biden’s strong approval numbers and the fact that he could help in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida.
Personally I feel quite reassured that Obama has picked someone who has been such a strident critic of the Bush administration’s foreign policy these last eight years. His Iraq war vote is in fact a rare blemish on that record.
Martin, who would you prefer in his place ?
it is worrying to see how the electoral college is moving towards McCain on Electoral-vote.com.
I feel I should add, for anyone in this thread who would care to bet that John McCain will be the next US President – I will happily take your money, at evens. :-p
I have to agree with Joe Taylor – I’m happy to bet on Obama’s horse; the recent headlines about Obama being in trouble etc. fail to point out that the definition of Obama being ‘in trouble’ are that his lead is slightly smaller than it usually is. To be, being in trouble would mean being consistently behind. Even on days when a poll comes out that shows McCain ahead by a few points (and those days are rare, about one every three weeks), you usually get about two or three other polls coming out *the same day* which put Obama ahead by five points. There hasn’t been any sort of general poll agreement that puts McCain ahead since May. And as an episode of ‘The West Wing’ once said, “when the polls say the same thing over and over, week after week, it’s time to stop talking about margins of error.”
I’d also take issue with Sesenco’s wild theory that ‘the elite’ has forced Biden onto Obama. Apart from anything else, if this shadowy elite was to force anyone on Obama, I think their last choice would be Biden – they’d want someone safe and obsessively ‘moderate’ like Evan Bayh, Bill Nelson or Blanche Lincoln.
Obama is in trouble. Although I will do my betting through politicalbetting.com rather than anoraks offering poor odds on here.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/1117409,elexpoll082008.article
Obama’s support has been ebbing away for weeks now.
http://www.electoral-vote.com has individual state polls and over the last few weeks whereas the Democrats have remained strong in the other races in the Presidential election they have started to flounder and it all goes back to Obama’s Kinnock moment in Europe.
A few weeks ago Montana, Indiana, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri and Florida were out for Obama and he had a commanding lead. Not any more. Delude yourselves all you like. This is a tougher battle than the complacent Obama and co seem to have thought it was.
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The Observer’s Focus section has an excellent article on it.
We should be concerned but not panicking. It is not clear to me that Hilary would have faired any better. It is disapponting to see the drop in support for Obama, but as Electoral Map shows, Obama is not far behind in many states. Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are within reach and McCain has to defend more states like these than Obama.
Obama has to concentrate in getting his constituency out to vote; voters under 30, ethnic minorities and women.
I do not think the choice of VP will make much difference, and I do not see anything wrong with his choice.
I put his chances at 50:50, which I admit is not as good as I would like.
I’d disagree that Montana, Indiana, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri and Florida were all out for Obama a few weeks ago. Montana has actually got more pro-Obama as time has gone on; Indiana, Missouri and Florida have popped up into the Obama column once or twice but it’s been hardly consistent – they’re all more often than not in the McCain column and have been ever since the race started. Colorado is probably the only one in that list where Obama has seen a decline in his lead; Ohio is extremely unpredictable, veering wildly from one poll to another.
I think the Victory Column speech was probably the beginning of Obama’s troubles; the perversity of turning against someone because they’re too popular began there. But it’s not the source of all the troubles – around the end of July, McCain began to learn how to attack Obama with a light touch, and it was quite effective. It’s the traditional Republican tactic harnessed over the past decade of attacking someone’s strengths rather than their weaknesses. If McCain was the Democratic candidate, they’d be attacking his bad flying skills, and asking just what kind of information he gave in that POW camp. Rubbish, but that’s what they’d be doing, and it would be effective in removing the most outstanding feature from the candidate’s biography.
Douglas said:
“I’d also take issue with Sesenco’s wild theory that ‘the elite’ has forced Biden onto Obama. Apart from anything else, if this shadowy elite was to force anyone on Obama, I think their last choice would be Biden – they’d want someone safe and obsessively ‘moderate’ like Evan Bayh, Bill Nelson or Blanche Lincoln.”
They’d want someone who has a record of backing the elite when it matters, ie, the Iraq War.
The elite forced Johnson on Kennedy, and forced Bush Snr on Reagan. Granted, the elite doesn’t always get its first choice. They failed to get Nelson Rockefeller and had to make do with Nixon. And they failed to get Bush Snr when Ross Perot split the right-wing vote and let Clinton through. But Clinton did everything the elite told him to do. He never let them down once. If he had done, he would have gone the same way as JFK and RFK. The threat of the assassin’s bullet certainly concentrates Presidential minds when it comes to any temptation to deviate.
McCain’s strengths are his jingoism, his military record and his enthusiasm for war. His weakness is his lack of appeal to the Christian right.
Obama’s weakness is his race. Many rednecks who wouldn’t normally bother to leave their log cabins will go out and vote for McCain just to stop a black man getting into the White House.
If Obama is to win he absolutely has to motivate ethnic minorities, who tend to vote in low numbers. And he has to do so without alienating moderate whites.
So you think Obama is “in trouble” and yet concede that he has a better than evens chance of winning? Huh. :-p
First, the bad news. His numbers have declined for sure, but from a peak in late June. Obama didn’t arrive in Germany until nearly the end of July. Attributing it to his European trip is a serious mangling of the data.
The reality of the situation is that the Republicans have thrown absolutely everything they can at Obama in a two-month-long negative ad blitz, odious swiftboater Jerome Corsi has just sold his millionth copy of the Big Book of Obama Smears, and right-wing mudslingers have been attempting to tie him to 70’s terrorist group The Weathermen.
The result? Obama still has a small but measurable lead, and this while he has spent the last two weeks on holiday…
Next week we will be hearing wall-to-wall coverage from the Democratic Convention about how John McCain can’t remember how many homes he has, thinks anyone earning under $5m is middle class, and wants go give himself a $300,000 tax cut. Let’s watch what happens. 😉
Given the amount of ammunition the Democrats have to use this election I seriously think they could be out of sight once the conventions and the debates are done.
And even if that doesn’t happen, don’t worry too much – Obama’s campaign still has one trick up its sleeve in its impressive presence on the ground.
[Also, if you think electoral-vote.com is an accurate reflection of the state of the race then you need to re-evaluate your choice of anoraks 😉
Simply listing the last poll in each state (and selectively at that) is a poor approach – try pollster.com or fivethirtyeight.com.]
McCain could really do a trick by asking Hilary to be his running mate. I’ve no doubt she is shameless enough, & her happy followers are blind enough, to appreciate that. It would be a real blow to Obama.
Don’t know if that thought has struck anyone else.
Douglas, whether you agree with it or not all of the states I mentioned had polls showing Obama in the lead a couple of weeks ago.
There is a decline in Obama’s support and he desperately needs a bounce from the convention.
In reply to Joe, it is all very well slagging off electoral map, but you don’t say where you like to keep your anarack!
Electoral map is not perfect because it reports on the latest polls, and they get out of date. So for a long time Indiana was in the Democrat tally, but that was based in one poll. The vast majority of polls there suggest Indiana will vote Republican, as it usually does.
Another good source is Real Clear Politics, see http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/latestpolls/index.html
As I said, http://www.pollster.com and http://www.fivethirtyeight.com do a much better job of handling the state-by-state data.
Having learned a bit more about Joe Biden, I should amend what I wrote above.
There are a number of things about Biden that make him an unlikely choice for the elite:-
(1) He is a Roman Catholic. Only one Roman Catholic has ever become President (JFK). The elite tried its damndest to stop him, and ultimately had him killed.
(2) He is of mixed German and Irish descent and was brought up in a mainly German town. Only one Irish American has ever become President (JFK), and only one German (Eisenhower).
(3) He has no “bloodline” antecedants, as far as I can ascertain (unlike Bush and Clinton, whose male lines lead back to Laxton in Nottinghamshire).
Does anyone know anything about Barack Obama’s mother’s family? It is often said by ill-informed commentators that Colin Powell got to the top of the US military despite being black and a complete outsider. What they don’t notice (and explains Powell’s rise and acceptance by the elite) is that he is descended from the British Royal Family.
In a society as obsessed by identity as the United States, these things matter.
My advice for Senator Obama: wear a bullet-proof vest. If J Edgar Hoover had still been in charge of the FBI, Obama would be dead already.