On the eve of the upcoming donkey fight, I just want to remind people again that Senator Obama is not the nominee until the delegates vote, and that the Clintons remain the Clintons. Don’t think that there aren’t a lot of delegates (and nervous superdelegates particularly) passing around recent polls showing Hillary outpolling Obama against McCain.

One could in fact speculate that the selection of Biden was an attempt by a desperate Obama campaign to hang on to the old guard of the party. I suspect that the coming week will be quite entertaining. It’s good that McCain can wait until the end of the week to announce his own running mate.

[Update a few minutes later]

It strikes me that if the superdelegates vote to make Senator Obama the nominee, they will have failed in their intended purpose, which was to prevent candidates who were too far left, in the wake of McGovern. But as I’ve been saying for months now, they’re in a no-win situation. They can anoint The One, and have him lose (and probably with negative coattails down ticket) or they can elevate Hillary! and tear the party apart, probably with race riots. Sux to be them.

Arthur Silber has some belated advice for the Obama campaign:

…it might be best if you took some time to study dramaturgy in addition to…well, everything else. One of the keys to a certain kind of dramatic structure is that the climax occurs at the moment of maximum suspense. The arrival and duration of that particular moment are determined by the ways in which the preceding conflicts have been developed until the opposing forces have reached the point where the conflicts must be resolved, at least in significant part. The climactic moment cannot be prolonged beyond what the accumulated weight of the dramatic structure will bear. If it is prolonged too much, drama and suspense begin to ebb. When it is prolonged far too much, then what had been rigid goes slack; what had been stiff hopes, if you will, begin to droop.

In such lamentable circumstances (which all of us have experienced; yes, you have too, don’t deny it), instead of an ecstatic explosion, we are sometimes left with only a pathetic dribble. In this case, the pathetic dribble goes by the name Joseph Biden.

A Biden dribble just before the Democratic convention is a shocking failure of dramatic imagination. This exercise in digital manipulation was certainly not good for me, and I can’t imagine it was good for anyone, probably including Obama. I very much doubt that even Barack wants a cigarette after this failure to achieve satisfactory completion.

I know I don’t.

I commented a few months ago about this tendency of anti-war protestors. Well, they’re at it again in Denver:

If you want a real invasion over oil to protest, you could march against the Russian invasion of Georgia, but that’s not happening. What’s next — protests against Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba?

Hell, some of them are still upset that we didn’t lose fast enough in Vietnam to suit them.

Andrew Ferguson wrote a review of his book last year, as part of a longer piece. John McCormack pulls out the nut grafs:

What does a discerning reader learn from Biden’s book that we didn’t already know? Perhaps not much, if you’re a regular watcher of C-SPAN or a longtime resident of Delaware. But there is something unforgettable about watching the man emerge on the page. His legendary self-regard becomes more impressive when the reader sees it in typescript, undistracted by the smile and the hair plugs. Biden quotes at great length from letters of recommendation he received as a young man, when far-sighted professors wrote movingly of his “sharp and incisive intellect” and his “highly developed sense of responsibility.” These qualities have proved to be more of a burden than you might think, Biden admits. “I’ve made life difficult for myself,” he writes, “by putting intellectual consistency and personal principle above expediency.”

Yes, many Biden fans might tag these as the greatest of his gifts. Biden himself isn’t so sure. After a little hemming and hawing–is it his intelligence that he most admires, or his commitment to principle, or his insistence on calling ’em as he sees ’em, or what?–he decides that his greatest personal and political virtue is probably his integrity. Tough call. But his wife seems to agree. He recounts one difficult episode in which she said as much. “Of all the things to attack you on,” she said, almost in tears. “Your integrity?”

This lachrymose moment came during Biden’s aborted presidential campaign in 1988, when reporters discovered several instances of plagiarism in his campaign speeches and in his law school record. Biden rehearses the episode in tormenting, if selective, detail, and true to campaign-book form, his account serves as the emotional center of the book. The memoir of every presidential candidate must describe a Political Time of Testing, some point at which, if the narrative arc is to prove satisfying, the hero encounters criticism, most of it unjust, but then rallies, overcomes hardship and misfortune and the petty, self-serving attacks of enemies, and emerges chastened but wiser–and, come to think of it, more qualified to lead the greatest nation on earth.

Is there something about pompous windbags that somehow makes them more electable? If so, then maybe an Obama/Biden ticket has a chance.

Not.

The healing continues.

If I were a Dem, they’d have to put me on suicide watch. At least, if I weren’t in denial.

Was Obama hoping that Biden’s past (and future) gaffes would overshadow and distract from his own?

And to think that just a few days ago one of my trolls was trying to convince me that Chuck Hagel isn’t an idiot:

“Joe Biden is the right partner for Barack Obama. His many years of distinguished service to America, his seasoned judgment and his vast experience in foreign policy and national security will match up well with the unique challenges of the 21st Century. An Obama-Biden ticket is a very impressive and strong team. Biden’s selection is good news for Obama and America.”

I don’t understand why the guy even bothers to call himself a Republican.

[Late afternoon update]

Oy:

Maybe when I get to Denver I’ll find someone who’ll explain to me why Biden is an inspired choice. He doesn’t have gravitas. He has seniority. We’ve been waiting for him to mature for decades. Only Chuck Hagel (his chief competitor as Sunday morning gasbag) could make him look wise…

There are a lot of people Obama could have picked that would have helped him with the south and west. But gun control remains a big issue in those regions. Obama has a problem because he professes support for the Second Amendment, as long as it doesn’t actually nullify any gun laws. So you’d think he’d not have picked a running mate who gets an “F” from the NRA. This isn’t going to help him with the bitter gun clingers.

[Late afternoon update]

A golden oldie from the primaries: Biden disses a gun owner. Well, the guy was probably bitter anyway.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “Obama Joe Biden”? It could have a subliminal effect.

Anyway, I think that Jonah has the best take on the veep pick:

He says interesting things, from time to time. I think he makes a fair point here and there. He was correct, for example, that Congress needed to have a real debate over the war. I think he has some obvious verbal intelligence. But, again, what’s fascinating — and what might be distracting some folks from seeing his underlying-yet-occassional smarts — is that he lets his ego and vanity get in the way. The man loves his voice so much, you’d expect him to be following it around in a gray Buick, in defiance of restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization’s usual imperatives to stop talking. Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don’t understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I’m going to get right to it and besides these aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

This is going to be a very entertaining election. I think that they’re going to be a double-barrelled gaffe machine.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jay Nordlinger:

All politicians have sizable egos, but this may be the most self-loving ticket ever. There’s an old saying, “He’ll die in his own arms” — that can apply to both of them. (I’ve thought of it in connection with McCain, too.) And Obama and Biden are two of the gassiest politicians in all the land — they are rhetorically impossible.

I suspect that after a couple non-stop months of the Joebama Show, not that many are going to look forward to four years of it.

And the McCain campaign was ready to go with the ad.

[Update at noon]

Hey we not only have a messiah, but a veep who’s a certified genius. Just ask him.

[Update half an hour later]

PJM has a link roundup of reax.

[Update in the afternoon]

Man, Limbaugh must think he died and went to heaven. I’ll bet he has a huge library of Biden audio gaffes, enough for fresh material every week from here to November.