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Obama hopes Biden can fill in the blanks

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

August 24, 2008

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is hoping Joe Biden can be all the things he's not in this campaign.

Experience versus change. Blue-collar versus Harvard Law. Foreign-policy hand versus fresh face. Maybe even impassioned versus cerebral.

And don't forget attack dog. Obama barely let the name John McCain pass his lips yesterday in Springfield, Ill. Biden couldn't stop talking about McCain, ripping into his friend and fellow senator during a feisty, finger-pointing address.

That warmed the hearts of Democrats, who have begun to fret openly that Obama has fallen even in the race for president - by not fighting back hard enough against McCain attacks calling him more "celebrity" than commander-in-chief.

Now they're hoping Biden will give the ticket a boost. Political analysts yesterday praised Biden as a solid if somewhat conventional pick - no game-changer, to be sure, but a clear plus.

He's perhaps the one contender on Obama's short list who has the best chance to shore up the nominee's own specific political weaknesses - both in hands-on experience and among key voting groups, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton's white working-class supporters.

"It's a classic strategy of balancing the ticket, picking a running mate who is strong where you're not strong," said Jack Pitney, a political-science professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "You do it to reassure people that the White House will hold somebody who can compensate for any weakness you have."

Pitney and others even said the Biden choice is in the mold of Dick Cheney, in that he fills in some obvious weaknesses for Obama, in much the way Cheney did for George W. Bush.

There are clear risks to Biden - he can be long-winded and prone to gaffes. He once called Obama "clean" and "articulate" in remarks viewed as having racial overtones. And Republicans have already put up a television ad noting that one of Obama's sharpest critics in the presidential race was Joe Biden.

But facing a clear tightening in the polls lately, the Obama campaign clearly set aside all of those concerns - hoping Biden can help them on a variety of fronts. In fact, Biden's pick is the clearest sign yet that Obama realizes his change message alone probably won't be enough to carry him to the White House. The irony is that a candidate running as an outsider to Washington is turning to a true Washington insider for help.

First and foremost, voters say the biggest gap between Obama and McCain is foreign policy leadership - a gap highlighted by the recent skirmishes between Russia and Georgia.

"People who were probably leaning toward Obama but were a little nervous, this makes them more comfortable," political analyst Stu Rothenberg said of the Biden pick. "But the people who were skeptical about Obama or uncertain, I don't think that's enough to budge them off where they are."

Experts see more direct benefits to sending Obama into the Rust Belt states where Clinton cleaned up - and Obama continues to lag among her supporters. It's no accident the campaign highlighted Biden's Scranton, Pa., roots and working-class Irish Catholic background.

But in reality, Biden's big job is finding a way to cut John McCain down to size, much the way he tried to with Rudy Giuliani's flag-draped campaign. If he can come up with a zinger to match the one he leveled at America's Mayor - "there's only three things he mentions in a sentence, a noun and a verb and 9/11" - Biden will have done his job.

THE BIDEN FACTOR

PROS

EXPERIENCE 36 years as a U.S. senator from Delaware.

POLICY BONA FIDES Biden has served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 1975 and is now chairman, casting him as a seasoned foreign policy hand and helping to bolster Obama's weakest point.

EVERYMAN APPEAL Biden has blue-collar roots that may resonate with voters; he was born in Scranton, Pa., and he remains popular in that state, which is expected to be critical in the election. While he favors abortion rights, as does Obama, Biden grew up Roman Catholic, a voting bloc into which Obama needs to make inroads.

POLITICAL STYLE Biden can roll up his sleeves and go into attack mode in political engagements, potentially complementing Obama's cooler, more distant style.

OUTSIDER He maintains an outside-the-Beltway image, commuting home to Wilmington, Del., by train every night.

CONS

GAFFES Biden has a reputation for long-windedness and for making statements that return to haunt him. He once said Obama was "not ready" for the presidency. Describing Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate, Biden once called him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy ... "

NAME RECOGNITION Despite six terms as a U.S. senator, he is from a small state and may not be well-known enough nationally to draw voters to the ticket.

HONESTY He was accused of plagiarism in a paper he wrote at Syracuse University Law School. In a speech he gave during his short-lived 1988 presidential bid, he used unattributed passages from a British politician's speech.

NO EXECUTIVE PEDIGREE The ticket is comprised of two senators with no executive experience.

IRAQ Biden initially voted for the Iraq war, an unpopular position among many Democrats. Obama made his own opposition to the war a critical part of his primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

- Craig Gordon and Sophia Chang