Campaign Diaries

Barack Obama and Joe Biden just held their first joint rally in Springfield, IL, and the two men’s speeches gives us a better idea of the parts of Biden’s biography that the campaign will push the strongest: More than his foreign policy experience, his expertise on Iraq, Georgia and national security, it is Biden’s economic background, his commitment to the middle class and his appeal to white ethnics that the campaign chose to outline.

Overall, the goal was clear: Address whatever fears white working-class voters might have about Obama, his values and his alleged elitism. Voters might not know Biden, but in many ways that’s even better, as the Obama campaign gets to use the next 5 days to introduce him to the public by highlighting whatever attributes they want voters to remember about him.

How many times today did we hear that Biden is from Scranton? How many times did we hear that he commutes home via train every single day? Here’s a typical sentence, from Obama’s introductory speech: “That’s because he is still that scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds; the dedicated family man and committed Catholic who knows every conductor on that Amtrak train to Wilmington.”

This is the Joe Biden Obama seems most anxious that voters meet first; the time will come, of course, to outline his foreign policy experience, but the most urgent task at hand for the Delaware Senator (”Pennsylvania’s third Senator,” said Obama’s PA chair) is to shore up Obama’s support among white ethnics - the constituency Obama has difficulty with.

This is, in essence, a quest for the Hillary voter. And while Obama did not end up choosing his former rival as his running-mate, nor one of her former supporters, today’s speeches showed that his campaign intends to use Biden to reach the electorate Clinton appealed to.

In particular, the Biden pick looks like an opportunity for Obama to showcase his “Americanness” and that of the Democratic ticket. In his introduction, Obama praised Biden’s “resilience” in the face of adversity - an attribute, Obama said, that defines the American Dream. Soon after, Biden noted that he and Obama shared an “American story,” celebrating Obama’s biography, that of a kid being raised by a single mother who sometimes lived on food stamps.

Biden went on to call Obama “Barack America.” I don’t know whether that was a slip or if it was deliberate, and it was certainly making the point a bit too forcefully, but today’s speeches leave little doubt that next week’s convention will be largely devoted to “Americanizing” Obama’s image, showcasing values that those Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who are still reluctant to embrace Obama can relate to.

Today’s speeches also showed us something else: Joe Biden will not be John Edwards. He will not shy away from being an attack dog, and as we learned from his past one-liners (”A noun, a verb and 9/11″), Biden can fulfill this role very effectively. Today, Biden pointed out that McCain is his friend, but he went on to rip the Arizona Senator for supporting the Bush Administration and offering “more of the same.” We cannot take the risk of “four more years of George W. Bush and John McCain,” said Biden, who hit McCain for being out of touch on the economy. While Americans sit at their kitchen table to figure out how to pay the bills, Biden says, McCain has “to think about which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.

And he hits McCain’s real estate holdings, a signal that Obama has settled firmly on his negative message and the coming convention is likely to be a forum for extended derision of the Republican nominee. Biden says that while, “at kitchen tables like mine,” Americans worry about their shrinking incomes, “that’s not a worry [McCain] has to worry about.” “You have to think about which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at,” Biden says, going on to quote McCain’s praise of Bush.

Coming just 48 hours from the start of the Democratic convention, this was a clear signal that Obama has no intention of transforming the week into a repeat of the 2004 convention, when John Kerry had instructed speakers to not criticize Bush. We still have to see the degree to which next week’s speakers will go negative, of course, but if today is any indication the controversy over McCain’s houses will feature prominently. As I said two days ago, the willingness to hit McCain could prove very important for Obama in his quest to rally the base.

Republicans, meanwhile, are doing what they can to undermine Obama’s choice. Two narratives seem to predominate: The first is that the choice of Biden demonstrates that Obama does not trust his own judgment, the second is that Biden has been critical of the Illinois Senator in the past. Early this morning, the McCain campaign released a memo:

Senator Biden doesn’t believe that Senator Obama is ready to serve as president. When asked about Senator Obama’s lack of experience he said, “The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.” The fact is, there has been no harsher critic of Senator Obama’s lack of readiness to serve than his new running-mate, Senator Joe Biden.

As speculation had surrounded Biden for days now, the McCain campaign clearly had ample time to prepare opposition material, and it has also already released an ad that will air in “key states:”

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDVUPqoowf8"]

No word on how much the McCain campaign intends to run this ad, but as I pointed out yesterday this type of strategy has not been particularly successful in the past. The Obama campaign is probably already ready with a response to this predictable attack. Overall, this is a curious situation in which most of the GOP’s criticism is aimed at Obama via praise for Biden rather than Republicans attacking Biden himself - certainly a very unusual situation, and we have to wonder whether this could backfire by making voters trust Biden more.