Obama's VP Pick

Obama appears to be poised to announce his VP pick soon, probably on Wednesday. I'm pleased to see that one of my favorites, Joe Biden, has made the short list of three. The other two are Tim Kaine (governor of VA), and Evan Bayh (senator from IN). I think he should choose Biden for several reasons. Biden is an old Washington hand, and knows how the system works. He's a foreign policy expert who knows what he's talking about, even though he probably talks too much. But above all, he'd make a great attack dog, and since Obama seems to want to set himself above the fray, he desperately needs someone like Biden to do the McCain-bashing for him.

McCain is getting really annoying. He attacks Obama at every opportunity, and everything he says about himself seems to be prefaced with, "... and did you know I was a POW?" As if 5-1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton is somehow a qualification to be president. And now the news is surfacing that his famous "cross in the dirt" story is the equivalent of an evangelical urban legend. Variations of the story have been around for years, including this version attributed to Solzhenitsyn in a sermon from 1997. McCain's first versions of the story, in which the Christian POW was anonymous, came out in 1999. In later versions that POW miraculously became McCain himself. Someone fearless has to take on McCain and expose him to be the pandering liar he really is. Maybe in this particular case, that exposure is better left to reporters or the blogosphere, but I think that Biden would do a good job on the day-to-day BS of the McCain campaign.

I'm still very disappointed in how Obama is running his campaign. Maybe he's keeping his powder dry till after the convention. Maybe his idea of a new kind of nuanced politics will take off. But maybe not. He getting hammered by McCain in the meantime, and if he doesn't get more aggressive soon, he will lose this election in what should be a Democratic landslide year.