The Sunshine Empire

The political commentary class is all a twitter about the selection of Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware as Barack Obama’s running mate.  Now Biden, like McCain has a history of scandal in the ’80′s that not many remember.  The liberal media seems not to want to talk about McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal, but they also are not touching hard on Biden’s plagiarism during his 1988 run for the Democratic nomination.  Now this can easily be countered by the McCain campaign plagiarizing Wikipedia for their Georgia press release, but I’ve actually enjoyed reading the difference between the liberal blogs and the conservative media.  There is nothing clear about the reaction of the political elite on both sides.

Reading NRO’s The Corner blog, the big debate raging is whether Obama had his text message announcement of the Biden as running mate story sent at 3:00 AM as a slight dig at Hillary Clinton.  One poster stated that if it was true, and he was convinced it was, it proved the rank arrogance of Barack Obama.  The other that stated oxygen would be at a premium with professional talkers Biden and Obama in Denver was most assuredly right.

The reaction on the left was been decidedly positive.  With the exception of whacked out Hillary supporters on the fringe this seems to be a good move for Obama, if shoring up the foreign policy side of his equation.  I stated earlier that I did not think Biden brought a state, and that went against the conventional wisdom.  Yet when you look back at recent picks, they’ve not brought in the states as thought.  Al Gore failed to win Tennessee or Arkansas, and his Connecticut running mate did not produce a bevy of electoral votes.  Dick Cheney comes from a state that has less people than most mid-range cities, and John Edwards did not have a glacier’s chance in Hades of winning North Carolina for the Kerry ticket.  Even going back to Bob Dole’s pick of New Yorker Jack Kemp only produced one of the funniest parody political bumper stickers ever.  But the clear political reality is that running mates reassure voters about gaps in your own record.