Biden to Get the Nod

Newsrooms are buzzing today over the expected announcement tomorrow by Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) campaign on who his running mate will be. The back-channel pundits are theorizing the list has been winnowed down to three finalists — Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.), Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and Sen. Joseph Biden (Del.) — and now it’s up to Obama on when he wants to make the call.

Through my own tea-leaf reading, I believe Sen. Biden will get the nod. On substance, he has few equals. If he doesn’t know the answer to a question, you can bet he’ll find it, post-haste. But his strength is also Biden’s primary weakness — he doesn’t know when enough is enough. We’ve all seen the parodies of him droning on in speech after speech. It can be quite numbing. Yet the senator’s gray hair and chiseled wrinkles of past battles stand in stark contrast to Oil-of-Olay Obama.

I think that’s part of the reason you haven’t seen Biden out on the trail recently. He’s laying low. You don’t need to see much of Joe Biden because you know what he’s capable of, and that’s many things, but primarily he’s a juggernaut on foreign policy matters. The fact that he’s a known quantity affords him the opportunity to be somewhat of a surprise to the Democratic faithful next week — to the extent that ever really matters.

Contrast Biden with the gentleman from Indiana. Sure, Evan Bayh looks great on paper, but that’s about it. A former governor, he has the executive branch experience. Yet it’s not his time. He’s still a bit green. Watch his speeches from last month, along with his vanilla appearances on the Sunday circuit, and you’ll see what I’m saying.

The same is true for Tim Kaine. I think the governor has a glass jaw when it comes to raw politics. Sure, he mixed it up with Republican Jerry Kilgore to win the governorship, but Virginia politics is not near as smash-mouth as national politics, and I think Kaine would wilt under the intense pressure and light of a presidential campaign. Obama knows that.

So you heard it here first, folks! Sen. Biden is the best shot for Obama to smooth out his rough edges on foreign policy and international affairs. The only unanswered question that remains is how will Hillary take the news and what price will she seek to exact from Obama’s camp during the convention as payment??