Biden blues

VP choice a letdown after talk of new politics

Joe Biden.

Thud.

If you’re going to make an uninspiring choice for your vice presidential running mate — and Barack Obama is hardly the first presidential candidate to have done so — at the very least the choice should be safe. It should not put your message at risk. But Joe Biden is not entirely safe, as anyone who has followed his career knows all too well. The Delaware senator is a walking verbal gaffe waiting for the right opening.

It won’t be a stupid gaffe if it happens, because Biden is anything but dumb. It will be a careless verbal slip, the result of Biden’s tendency to say whatever pops into his head without mentally editing it first. So if Biden is not safe, what does a career politician who personifies the entrenched Washington status quo and is a conventional liberal on almost every important issue, from the economy to defense, bring to the Democratic ticket? A ticket, remember, based on the premise of change and transcending partisanship?

The stock answers: Biden brings foreign policy expertise and Middle American roots (Scranton, Penn.) Fair enough, we suppose. Yet speaking of the second claim, we’ve seen little evidence that Biden on the campaign trail establishes any special connection with the blue-collar Democrats and independents that Obama has been trying to woo. Indeed, they tend to be precisely the voters most likely to be turned off by the long-winded pomposity to which Biden is occasionally prone. The Democratic ticket now has two senators — both lawyers — who went into legislative politics at a fairly young age and thus have no serious executive experience. They both have compiled distinctly left-of-center voting records, with the difference being that Biden’s extends back decades as opposed to a few years.

For example, not only can Biden boast of having opposed the Bush tax cuts, he also was one of only 21 senators in 1986 who balked at the historic tax reform that flattened rates and simplified the code. For that matter, in 1981 he even opposed protecting taxpayers from being pushed into ever-higher tax brackets by inflation —in an era, remember, of surging prices. Obama knows this history, presumably. Yet he must have concluded that Biden’s foreign policy credibility — he’s chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and by all accounts a serious student of the issues — is the campaign’s overriding need at the moment given McCain’s angle of attack.

Whether Biden will be able to reassure Obama-leery voters with his background and expertise involving world affairs of course remains to be seen. Voters tend to ignore vice presidential candidates for the most part — and we’d be surprised if this campaign turned out to be an exception. Then again, John McCain still has something to say about that as he prepares for his own announcement on Friday.