I just spent 14 of the last 50 hours driving up to Batavia, New York in the backseat of a 1999 Mustang for my grandmother's 90th birthday party. With several family stops on the way, there was no time to blog. I feel pretty dazed, but I still want to catch up with some thoughts on Biden, the state of the campaign, and the upcoming conventions.
With his early support for the Iraq war and his six terms in the Senate, Biden is clearly a balancing pick rather than a reinforcing pick. It should be said that while I had advised against such a pick for along time, when it came down to a choice between Kaine--who is a reinforcing pick---and Biden, I actually wanted Biden. In the end, picking someone who is a credible national campaigner, a credible president, and who is in the center of the Democratic Party rather than its right-wing, just meant more to me than the reinforcing criteria. Maybe there just weren't enough reinforcing options. Sherrod Brown probably would have been the best choice.
In terms of process, it seems fair to say that Biden probably didn't live up to the extreme suspense the Obama campaign had built up around the pick. By this point, the only people who could have lived up to the suspense were Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, either of whom would have overshadowed Obama on the campaign trail. Since that isn't a good idea, there probably wasn't any way to make a good choice and live up to all the suspense. As such, the selection of Biden probably won't give Obama an immediate bump. Hopefully, Biden will be able to give him a boost as the campaign continues.
If we made a difference online, it was stopping Evan Bayh. That isn't much, but it also isn't nothing.
New, strange state polls from Mason-Dixon (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) and Zogby (Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia). They range from the improbably good (Obama up 8 in North Carolina) to decent (Obama up 3 and 6 in Colorado, up 2 in Virginia) the pretty bad (McCain up four in New Hampshire and New Mexico). The truth is, they are probably all crap. These aren't the most reliable polling firms around.
I don't expect we will know where the campaign stands until the tracking polls on September 11th. This is entirely unrelated to the attacks seven years ago, just that it will contain the first three days of weekday polling in the week after the Republican convention.
I am completely fried. Full-time blogging will resume tomorrow morning. I will not be in Denver, but I will be writing about the convention all week long.
