Wednesday-Night

See also the (vice presidential) debates
Biden Interview with Charlie Rose  9 August 2007

The Joe Biden Show
I saw a strong, authoritative, confident and sensitive candidate emerge. On the whole, he came across as intelligent and relatable; a real person. That’s a quality that often eludes Barack Obama.
Biden’s job in many ways was to reintroduce himself to Americans. Palin had stolen the spotlight, and he was campaigning in the shadows. The media was ignoring him. Voters didn’t know him. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 32 percent of Democrats, 38 percent of independents and 41 percent of Republicans said they didn’t know or had no answer when asked to say what they most liked about Biden.
That night he reintroduced himself with panache and probably further strengthened an already strengthening Democratic ticket.
August 27
Acceptance speech transcript

Biden Opens New Phase With Attack on McCain
(NYT) DENVER — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware accepted the Democratic vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday night with an ode to his middle-class upbringing and a blistering attack on Senator John McCain.
On tax policy and the war in Iraq, on health care and terrorism, on the minimum wage and on Russia, Mr. Biden said, the contrast was clear between Mr. McCain and the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama.

FACTBOX: Sen. Biden. Democratic VP candidate
(Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has chosen Joseph Biden of Delaware, one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. Senate, as his vice presidential running mate for the November 4 election.
Here are some facts about the 65-year-old lawmaker, considered a leading expert on foreign affairs.

Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

In Obama’s Choice, a ‘Very Personal Decision’
Over the course of two months, as the dynamics of the presidential campaign and world events shifted quickly, Mr. Biden’s stock rose through one of the most rigorous vice-presidential vetting processes that Democrats could recall. It was a process in which Mr. Obama applied intense secrecy, careful pragmatism and political input from a team of internal and external advisers that have guided his campaign from the start. And it ended Thursday with a phone call from Mr. Obama, who reached Mr. Biden as he was at a dentist’s office where he had taken his wife to have a root canal. [This will no doubt lead to very bad jokes about rather having a root canal]
… people involved in the process said it was not just foreign policy that tilted the balance. They said Mr. Obama’s decision had as much to do with Mr. Biden’s appeal among white working-class voters and compelling personal story, and his conclusion that the Delaware senator was “a worker.”
… Reports came back that he was not only potentially more energetic and disciplined than widely known, but also that he had a distinct appeal suited to the areas throughout the industrial Midwest where Mr. Obama had struggled in the primaries.
But Mr. Obama was [also] seeking a running mate with whom he would be comfortable governing for four or eight years
In addition to the four ultimate finalists, Democratic officials said, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut were also among those who received extensive consideration.
A Senate Stalwart Who Bounced Back
September 1987 was a month of ruin and renewal for Joe Biden.
Then a three-term senator from Delaware, Mr. Biden saw his bid for the Democratic nomination for president in tatters after he had been caught cribbing from other politicians’ speeches. He exited the race amid a chorus of Washington chatter that the presidency would never be his.
Yet just as his candidacy was ending, Mr. Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was leading the Democrats in a successful battle against Robert H. Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court. And soon after, Mr. Biden underwent surgery on two brain aneurysms. Had he continued running for president, friends say, the rigors might have exacerbated his health problems and even killed him.
The tumult of that period transformed Mr. Biden: He settled down into a role as a statesman of the Senate, becoming a serious student of policy and government. As the Democrats’ point man on crime and as a champion of the Violence Against Women Act, among other bills, Mr. Biden became a close ally of labor unions, civil rights leaders and women’s groups. While he drew ire from some feminists over the treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings, in 1991, he was also the only member of the Judiciary Committee to emerge with favorable marks from a majority of Americans, according to a Gallup poll.
So it’s Biden, eh?
(Foreign Policy blog) There’s already an incredible amount of instant punditry out there on Obama’s pick (you can find some of it here), but I believe in giving people a chance to speak for themselves before you characterize them one way or another (we’re already seeing stuff like: He’s Obama’s Cheney! It’s the all-talk ticket! etc.).
So, here’s a long, candid interview that Biden gave to Charlie Rose last August
What VP choice says about Obama
(BBC) No-one embarks on a career in American politics with the ambition of becoming vice-president, any more than athletes train for years in the hope of winning Olympic silver.
But the days when those number two slots on the tickets are finally filled provide some of the key moments in any campaign.
The selection of the vice-presidential nominee is often the first really big public test of judgement that a campaign faces - and the choice of running mate tells us a good deal about how the main candidate sees himself.
The golden rule, of course, is to pick someone who is something you are not.
Ronald Reagan - running as the outsider riding in from California to clean up government - picked George Bush senior, the consummate Washington insider.
When Mr Bush’s own turn came to run for the White House he was starting to look a little elderly - so he picked the youthful Dan Quayle as his number two.
It is true that Mr Quayle will largely be remembered for spelling the word “potato” incorrectly on a blackboard during a school visit in front of the world’s TV cameras, but at the time it made sense to select him because he balanced the ticket.
Regular guy
On the surface Mr Obama’s choice of running-mate looks a bit cautious and a little counter-intuitive.
After all, we now face the curious spectacle of a man who’s going to change the way business is done in Washington running alongside a political veteran who’s now serving his sixth term in the Senate.
But the Obama camp obviously feels that drawback is outweighed by the two factors which define Joe Biden.
First, he is a seasoned political professional who has been in the Senate since 1972
He has bags of legislative experience and he’s majored in foreign affairs - so he covers one of the glaring gaps in the Obama resume.
You can’t help wondering if the campaign finally settled on Joe Biden after the recent violence between Russia and Georgia reminded American voters that it’s a dangerous and unpredictable world out there - a world that might call for a little experience at the White House.
Second, and perhaps more important, he has managed to acquire all that experience while remaining in the eyes of most Americans a regular guy.
He was born in the gritty town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and has tales of early hardship that will resonate with the kind of blue-collar democrats who tended to support Hillary Clinton in the primaries - but who have so far failed to flock to the Obama colours.
He still lives in the town of Wilmington, Delaware, which is not far along America’s rust-belt from his home town, and he even commutes to Washington by train.
He’s a Catholic too, which helps with another constituency of doubters, and he is a witty - if occasionally garrulous - speaker. Expect to see him let loose as the Democratic attack dog, free to savage John McCain and his running-mate with the kind of soundbites that make the news and get remembered.
His characterisation of the standard speech by the Republican candidate, and former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, as “Noun.Verb.9/11″ is still the best gag of the campaign by miles.
At a personal level too, Mr Biden has dealt impressively with hardship - his wife and infant daughter were killed in a road accident just after he was elected to the Senate (he was sworn in at the hospital), but he recovered to work in the legislature and to bring up his two sons. He has since re-married.
Attack ad
All of those pluses of course, come with plenty of minuses too - Mr Biden was once described as a “gaffe machine”, and while that seems a little harsh, there have been plenty of unfortunate moments scattered throughout the Senator’s long career.
Most damaging of all perhaps was the extraordinary moment in 1988 when it turned out that a stump speech he’d been using as part of his bid for the Democratic nomination had been lifted from the British politician Neil Kinnock.
What made it particularly bizarre was the personal nature of a part of the speech about being the first member of his family to go to college.
It was a misjudgement which Republicans will argue points to some inner flaw.
And there are plenty of awkward moments from earlier in this campaign too when Mr Biden had another go at winning the Democratic nomination.
He described Mr Obama - rather uncomfortably - as a “clean and articulate” African-American, and when asked about the presidential credentials of the man who was then his rival - and who is now his boss - he said “the presidency is no place for on-the-job training”.
A Republican attack ad featuring that quote is already running - expect to see a lot more of it.
However, we shouldn’t get too carried away with all this.
After all, there’s no evidence that a candidate’s choice of running mate has any real bearing on their electoral prospects - not since the Texan Lyndon Johnson delivered the Lone Star State for John F Kennedy in the very tight 1960 campaign.
The Obama camp will have weighed Joe Biden’s strengths and weaknesses very carefully against each other and decided on balance that he helps the ticket.
As observers we can be sure that his sharp tongue and eventful past will make a race which is already fascinating seem more interesting still.