Reileen van Kaile

Washington - Senator Barack Obama has chosen Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware to be his running mate, turning to a leading authority on foreign policy and a longtime Washington hand to fill out the Democratic ticket, Mr. Obama announced in text and e-mail messages early Saturday.

    Mr. Obama's selection ended a two-month search that was conducted almost entirely in secret. It reflected a critical strategic choice by Mr. Obama: To go with a running mate who could reassure voters about gaps in his resume, rather than to pick someone who could deliver a state or reinforce Mr. Obama's message of change.

DENVER - The candidate of change went with the status quo.

In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness — inexperience in office and on foreign policy — rather than underscore his strength as a new-generation candidate defying political conventions.

[ . . . ]

The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

Neil in Chicago @ 112: "That said, can we move on the the imporant question? The economy is in the toilet. The war is in the toilet. The budget is in the toilet. etc. So why is Obama polling a lead in the low single digits??"

I have a theory that it's a clever ploy by the Obama campaign to dispel the Arrogant Celebrity Frontrunner/Plucky Gen-yoo-ine Underdog narrative that had been building recently. Obama's lead had been so huge, it was inevitable that it would narrow at some point. Once that happened, McCain's fans in the media would all be breathlessly wondering if McCain could pull off an amazing comeback. Nothing energizes a constituency like rooting for an underdog--it might have turned out the right-wing base like nothing else could. At the same time, a huge lead might lull Obama's supporters into a false sense of security, especially unreliable voters like college-aged kids and other new voters. A massive turnout has always been key to Obama's electoral strategy.

Instead, the Obama campaign goes silent--Obama goes on vacation, and the campaign directs their energies into GOTV training and infrastructure building, not trying to get media attention. McCain gets the spotlight for a couple of weeks, letting the voters to get to know him a little better, warts and all. Especially the warts. Rumors begin to spread: Is Obama falling apart? Liberals freak out and redouble their efforts. The gap narrows, McCain's unfavorable ratings shoot up, and Obama has piles of cash and a ground operation to die for. He blazes back into the spotlight, hitting whatever weaknesses McCain's recent media glare has revealed, and rides rising polls right into November.

...or so I hope.

bradhicks

When Obama gives a speech about his economic plan, there is often a moment when you can sense him shift from poetry to prose. He can be inspiring when talking about how the country ended up being the envy of the world. But when he comes to the part about what he wants to do next, how he wants to keep America the envy of the world, it can sound a little like a State of the Union laundry list.

His advisers are divided about how much of a problem this is. Some of them told me that he did have a unifying theme — the middle-class squeeze — and that it would become clearer to voters as they began paying closer attention to the race. Others said they didn’t think Obama had yet come up with a simple way to explain how he would alleviate that squeeze. Obama himself seems well aware of the stakes. In 2005, on a call-in public-radio show, he told a listener that Democrats hadn’t been as effective in telling a story about the country as Republicans. In the end, he said, people voted not for a hodgepodge of position papers but for someone who could explain to them where the country should be going.

So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s simple call for less government and lower taxes.

He paused for a few seconds and then said this:

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.

“Now, that’s the story. Now, telling it elegantly — ‘low taxes, smaller government’ — the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.”

sannion

Rihanna goes on to sing:

You can stand under my umbrella

And this is one of the most powerful metaphors in the piece. Here she is comparing Zeus to an umbrella, by which she means that Zeus is our shelter and protection from the storm, a noble sentiment indeed, and one that is truly worthy of the god that she hymns so lovingly. No doubt that is why she chose to give such a name to her piece, for it is truly the central theme of the song.

Oh, please. As you might know, Senator Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, which—last I checked—is a state. One of those United States, actually. Of America. But it turns out, according to political analyst Cokie Roberts, Hawaii is too "foreign" and "exotic" a locale for a campaigning presidential candidate to go to for vacation. Huh?

On yesterday's edition of ABC's This Week, Roberts criticized Senator Obama for "going off this week to a vacation in Hawaii," which she said "does not make any sense whatsoever." Funny, it makes perfect sense to me. Can't a guy go back to his home state to chill? According to Roberts:

"I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place... He should be in Myrtle Beach, and, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time."

Novels may be classified in this manner:

(a) Those that are best-sellers, (b) those that were assigned to you in school, (c) those that you feel you have already read even though you have not, (d) classics, (e) those that are not read as the author intended, (f) those that many intend to read “some day,” (g) fantasy trilogies, (h) those that are otherwise not flawed, (i) those that were written on manual typewriters, (j) those that can be judged by their covers, (k) those that were padded by their designers during production to appear longer than they are, (l) those that are only called ‘novel’ by courtesy, (m) those that have been condensed by Readers Digest, (n) those that look well upon the shelf.