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?