VP Choice

VP CHOICE, August 26, 2008
As anyone that has ever been involved in national Presidential campaigns, one of the most important decisions a candidate for President must make is who their Vice Presidential nominee will be. Over the weekend, Senator Barack Obama announced that Delaware Senator Joe Biden was his choice.
The Obama campaign created quite a stir in their announcement. In the weeks and days leading up to the announcement in Springfield, IL, the campaign was able to generate thousands of emails from interested parties that were promised that by providing their contact information, they would be the first to know who the choice was. I am not sure how many new email addresses the campaign was able to get, but it can only help in their fundraising attempts to pay for the general election. Word of the Biden choice got out early Friday evening, which kind of deflated the rationale for providing one’s contact information. I wonder how many times each contact address will be hit up for money and to volunteer?
There are many reasons to choose a particular person to be one’s Vice President. A number of the reasons include: age, demographic background, home state that might be in play during the general election, and to strengthen a perceived weakness of the Presidential nominee. The Obama team decided that they needed to shore up a weakness of the Senator – his lack of foreign policy experience. Senator Biden has been a Senator from Delaware since 1972, and is currently the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I believe that Senator Obama does not really gain anything by having Senator Biden on the ticket. First, very few people have ever even heard of Senator Biden. Those that have, probably remember his disastrous 1988 Presidential campaign where he was forced from the race over a plagiarism charge. Senator Biden has a well deserved reputation of being long-winded. It typically seems that he is trying to prove that he knows more about the subject than the questioner and that he is in fact smarter than the questioner. This however was not Biden’s first run in with plagiarism. According to Slate magazine’s Jack Shafer, “As E.J. Dionne Jr. reported in the previously mentioned Times article, he "plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school" at the Syracuse University College of Law. According to a Dec. 1, 1965, report by the law school, five pages of Biden's 15-page paper were copied without quotation or attribution.” One would think that if they truly believe that they are smarter than would have learned that it is easy to find out if you are copying someone else’s work. I would imagine that the nation will get to know about the plagiarism charges through television ads and comments from the RNC and McCain campaigns.
Another problem with the Biden choice is that he does not bring any state to the Obama side. Delaware was going to vote Democratic this November before the choice of Biden. The Obama campaign has tried to play up the notion that Senator Biden was born in Scranton, PA, hoping that this might keep Pennsylvania in their column. However, on Biden’s Senate website, it does not mention Pennsylvania and in fact states that he grew up in New Castle County, Delaware, not Scranton, Pennsylvania. I know that Obama needs help in Pennsylvania after the problems he had during primary where he had some choice words for small town folks from Pennsylvania.
Another reason for picking Biden was the fact that he is Catholic. The Democrats have seen a decreasing amount of support from Catholics and others of faith. The main reason for this is abortion. By picking Biden, one must assume that Catholics across the country would overlook an issue that many Catholics consider very important – the right to life. If the choice was supposed to appease Catholics, they were wrong. Already, the Arch Bishop of Denver has come out against Biden.
The choice of Biden also highlight’s the lack of experience of Obama. If the choice of Biden was to shore up a weakness, I think with the pick of Biden, it only exaggerates the weakness. If one was to look at their two resumes, one would logically think that Biden was the Presidential candidate while Obama was the Vice Presidential candidate. Biden is more ready to be President than Obama is. It seems that Obama, through his great speeches, has gotten the general public to overlook his lack of a resume. Then again, he is tied in most polls with McCain in a year that Democrats have a decided advantage over Republicans. The American public does not yet trust Obama to be President.
The biggest problem of the Biden choice though has to do with Obama’s primary rivalry with Senator Hillary Clinton. The Clinton supporters are incredibly loyal and are upset at how the campaign ended. They feel that Senator Clinton, after winning 18 million primary votes, should be the nominee. In fact, many of her supporters have told pollsters that they will not vote for Obama. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll stated that only 52 percent of Clinton supporters will definitely vote for Obama. A bigger problem is that 30 percent said that they would vote for McCain or stay home. The McCain campaign already has a television ad up that has a female Clinton supporter who states that she will now vote for McCain. They also have an ad where they use Senator Clinton’s own words against Obama. They seem to really be trying to play up the angst between the two. Many media organizations have played up this issue as often as possible. The television coverage of the first night was all about would the Clinton supporters play nice with the Obama supporters. The fact that this issue still exists, even after Senator Clinton has gone on the road for Senator Obama, should cause most Democrats to be very worried about the chances in November.
Vice Presidential choices typically are not the reason someone votes for a particular candidate. However, with the upcoming election, one has to look at Senator Obama’s choice of Joe Biden and ask the simple question of, ‘Why?’ If Obama really wants to claim to be a new kind of politician why would he have chosen an old Senator? It does not make a whole lot of sense to me, but then again, I am not a Democrat.