Hello, Joe! (Whadda ya know?)
August 23rd, 2008
So it’s Biden. Interesting. Not surprising, not a bad choice, not a homerun smash either. Probably the best possible choice but not the best choice; the best impossible choice is Hillary - that would have been a homerun smash, but, as I say, impossible.
The AP is being asinine about it, running an “analysis” claiming that picking someone who’s well-respected and has lots of experience shows a “lack of confidence”. As with everything in this campaign, there was no winning position for Obama, so it doesn’t matter what anyone says - if he’d picked a younger person, they’d criticize him for “lacking depth”. The real issue I see is that Biden carries this baggage of foot-in-mouth moments that will be getting heavy play during the campaign (the conservative blogs are already posting lists) - again not terrible, since anyone would be targeted by the right-wing noise machine, so it doesn’t matter whether he’s said those things or not. But it doesn’t help, especially since one line of attack on the GOP ticket is that Bush and McSame also say and do dumb things all the time.
What’s really interesting is that some of Biden’s more recent stellar moments have come at Obama’s expense. Now, it’s not unusual for Presidential candidates to pick a VP who was a former primary-campaign rival, and no doubt it takes a bit of hard swallowing to do that. But Biden was accused of crossing the racial line, including on this blog.* Obama was gracious about it at the time, which means he now doesn’t have to eat any of his own words about racial pride. (I guess that’s an upside to being gracious. Maybe I should try it. . . . Nah . . .) But still again, that may not make much difference. When George H.W. Bush correctly described Ronald Reagan’s tax plan as “voodoo economics”, it didn’t prevent Reagan from putting him on the ticket and winning. Biden’s awkward praise for Obama is light years away from Bush’s glaring and prescient direct attack on his own campaign’s platform, so there’s no reason it should matter either.
I suspect that Obama figured Biden’s considerable strengths would outweigh his relatively minor weaknesses. He’s likely right. The campaign is already too “interesting” for my comfort, but the Democrats have a strong ticket and they both know how to campaign. Hope they pull it off.
UPDATE: The excellent election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight throws some light on this from the perspective of voter dynamics. Taking the last pre-announcement popularity poll, Hillary shows a huge favorable/unfavorable ratings net balance among Democratic voters, the greatest for all possible Democratic VPs, but with high negatives also. Biden comes in pretty close behind her, but with much lower negatives within his own party. (And of course the rankings are just the opposite among GOP voters, but as Nate, the 538 blogger, points out, this hardly matters since it seems the Dems are going to pull very few crossover votes.) What is interesting is that, among independents, Biden has far and away the strongest net positive approval ratings, and Hillary’s are far and away the worst, among all Democratic VP hopefuls - in fact, she’s got a negative 18% approval rating among swing voters, while Biden’s is a net positive 13%. Nate also performs an interesting analysis showing that, making certain assumptions about crossover vote potential according to the balance of “Very Favorable, Favorable, Unfavorable, Very Unfavorable” responses, Biden pulls a slight positive net gain for the Democratic ticket while Hillary would actually have a net slightly negative effect on the ticket. (I’m not sure I believe this analysis, because I think he overestimates the probability of crossover votes, and I don’t think his analysis accounts for the “PUMA”/Hillary diehard effect, but it’s still worth considering.)
In short, Biden comes out as the strongest possible choice because he is almost as solid as Hillary within the party, has much lower intra-party negatives, and, most important, is vastly more popular among swing voters. And, although they have different styles, he’s on a part par with Hillary in political infighting and debate. Of course the statistical analysis treats pre-announcement popularity polls as if they’re static. The announcement alone will force some people to shift their opinions, and there’s a lot of political dynamics between now and the election. But, given what they know now, there’s a strong case to be made for Biden, and - crucially - not as strong a case to be made against him, compared to Hillary - in terms of voter appeal plain and simple. Which makes Obama’s choice easy to justify on those obviously important grounds.
UPDATE: Fixed typos.
* Yes, I’m now officially on record as calling the VP candidate on the ticket I’ll undoubtedly vote for a “dumb motherfucker”. But, you know, I meant it in a good way.
Categories: General, News & Current Events, Politics | 21 Comments
