Dartblog

Senator Barack Obama announced today that fellow Senator Joe Biden will join the Democrat ticket for 2008. Is anyone else as under whelmed as I am? The media hype surrounding this election has portrayed Sen. Obama as an exciting candidate of change. During the primary, Obama positioned himself as a revolutionary candidate - not only the first African American major party nominee, but a man with his mind firmly fixed on the future. Yet his choices since garnering the nomination do not live up to the label. I said months ago that if he wanted a conventional VP choice, he would select Joe Biden. Today, he followed the conventional route, choosing a candidate who brings with him extensive foreign policy experience as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and nothing else.

Due to frequent and memorable gaffes, including plagiarizing his speeches and responding to a question about his law school grades with the memorable quote “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do”, Biden has been unable to get a presidential campaign off the ground. He lacks the charisma that causes people to rally around him. A former Biden campaigner told me that people do not vote for the Vice President, so I can waste my time beating him down, but the ticket will still prevail. I remain unconvinced. While the running mate is not the deciding factor on a ticket, he certainly can help or hurt. Biden will not hurt the ticket [assuming the Obama campaign keeps tight control over his unfortunate tendency to make blunders when speaking off script]. But, will Biden help the ticket? Unlikely.

Lack of foreign policy experience can not be fixed by a running mate. It is, after all, the President who controls foreign policy. It is the President who is our ambassador to the world. Biden can only advise so much, and then only to the extent that Obama allows him. I guarantee that Obama will not let Biden sculpt his foreign policy. If you have any hopes of that, then you should disabuse yourself of them immediately. One must not forget that until Al Gore and Dick Cheney, the Vice President was pretty useless and he could easily return to such a position. In the end, Biden’s most important role will be as attack dog. Seems a bit small for a man with a distinguished career in government. At least in the Senate, one is guaranteed a vote. As Vice President, you have only the power that the President chooses to give you. Not an enviable job, to be sure.

This thoroughly ordinary choice for VP is but symptomatic of a larger problem plaguing the Obama campaign: how to recapture a momentum that was ephemeral to begin with. The excitement of the primary season is over. Obama’s ideas certainly are not innovative enough to keep the momentum going. After all, how many times can one hear the word “Change” before asking the inevitable question of “how”? Though he may still be bringing in the funds, his drop in the polls is indicative of a problem with his message. His speeches are brilliant rhetorically, but say nothing. Obama’s campaign, once off to such a promising start, is revealing the sand foundation upon which it was built. Voters do not want just a pretty face. They need someone to address the real problems that face a president on a daily basis. Biden once said that the presidency “is not something that lends itself to on-the-job-training.” Now, thanks to Obama himself, voters are starting to pay attention to this advice.

The Obama smokescreen may have worked for a while, but it looks like the air is clearing. The wizard behind the curtain does not seem quite so magical now, does he?