With his easy smile, golden tan and silver hair, Joe Biden boasts the congenial appeal of a classic game show host. Instead, the 65-year-old veteran senator from Delaware will try to make history by helping Barack Obama become America’s first black President.
In a campaign where the Democrats are making the need for change a major theme—employing slogans like “McBush” and “More of the Same” to attack Republican candidate John McCain—Obama’s choice for running mate is telling. First, by stressing Biden’s foreign policy experience—he played a key role in passing legislation endorsing the air raid in Kosovo in 1999—Obama aims to neutralize his own lack of experience in the same field. Second, by emphasizing Biden’s working-class roots, Obama is implicitly acknowledging the Republicans’ and right-wing media’s criticism of him as an elitist celebrity, and seeks to counter that perception by painting Biden as an “Average Joe.” When introducing his running mate for the first time, Obama gushed that Biden “is still that scrappy kid from Scranton [Pennsylvania] who beat the odds.”
Lastly, Obama’s choice of a white male Washington insider panders to independents and conservative democrats who find Obama unappealing. This is where the choice of Biden could backfire. It is unlikely that anyone who is uneasy about a Black president would vote for Obama anyway. And while Obama’s fresh, Oprah-approved face is integral to the Democratic Party’s theme of change, doesn’t Biden, who has been a member of Congress since 1972, represent more of the same? The sobering reality is that Obama’s choice of a white male Washington power player as vice president was a no-brainer. Selecting a black running mate would have been political suicide. Selecting a woman would have been too. Ironically, McCain, in what many view as a desperate attempt to pull even odds with Obama in the polls and win over Hillary Clinton supporters, has selected little-known Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience and rapidly increasing celebrity status—her designer specs are all the rage amongst political geeks—should take some of the pressure off of Obama.
Now that Obama has won the Democratic nomination, it’s crucial that he moves towards the centre of American politics, attracting those much-coveted mainstream voters. This means abandoning the idealistic rhetoric that attracted so many during the early days of Obama mania; that image of the charming senator from Illinois single-handedly transforming Washington politics. By appealing to urban intellectuals and blue-collar workers, the Obama-Biden ticket is designed for mass appeal. Biden is a hard-nosed veteran who knows his way around the halls of Congress and the corridors of power. Only time will tell whether that proves to be an asset or a liability to those clamouring for genuine change.
