Yesterday when I stopped by to pick up my daughter, my parents were both sitting at the kitchen table. "So who do you think is going to be the vice-presidential pick?" my mother asked. It was a rhetorical question because she immediately said, " If he doesn't pick Hillary, he's going to lose." She said it with enough force to make me think it might be true, but she's my mother, so I'm susceptible to her pronouncements. "But who do you think it will be?"
Because this is my family I know we are talking about the Democrats.
I reminded her that I was the one so sure that John Edwards should have been the nominee, so I'm not exactly a fountain of predictive wisdom, but then went on to express my mystification that Wesley Clark doesn't even seem to be on a short list.
The General is a formidable military presence and needing military experience is the only real true reason I have ever seen for Barack Obama to choose anyone else but Clinton. (Yes, I know Bill Clinton would be a spousal nuisance in a Clinton pick, but he's become like the national Uncle Arthur, problematic and not welcome at the family dinners, but he'll pop in and things will get lively while everyone rolls their eyes; we would deal).
"A lot of people are talking about Biden," I said.
It was the Biden to Clinton trajectory I kept hearing about in the days before the Iowa Caucuses in the coffee shop in the town square, in Indianola Iowa. The coffee shop was frequented by retired farmers, and shopkeepers from the square and it was from them that I routinely heard, either through active eavesdropping or the direct interview, several people state that Senator Joe Biden was their first choice, but if he turned out not to be viable (receiving 15% of the precinct vote), their second choice would be Hillary Clinton. There was an alternative to this game plan for Biden or Senator Chris Dodd supporters, which was to go with John Edwards or Bill Richardson as second or third choice. "Whichever of the bottom three is viable is the one I'll go with," said my friend Todd. "I'm sick of money and media determining the election."
The Biden to Clinton movement, however, was common because many people saw them as having the same basic platform and saw both as able to walk into office and know what they are doing from day one. As Biden said, "if it's experience we are after, I'm elected." Among the people I'd spoken to who choose Biden first and then Clinton, the reasoning had been that although the platforms were very similar, Biden was the less divisive figure. This might be the same rational Obama has, should Biden be the one tapped for the vice-presidency. I'm just not sure the safer choice right now is really the safer choice.
I had the opportunity to see Joe Biden on New Year's Day at the Indianola Warren County Administration Building with a crowd of approximately 150 people. The crowd got substantially bigger with the arrival of Biden's family. Somebody who looked like a fake Joe Biden arrived, with less hair and not as white teeth, along with an elderly woman and people speculated, rightly, that this was his brother Jimmy. His 90-year-old mother was also along: "Joey, you need my help."
Valerie Biden Owens introduced her brother telling the story about how Biden, elected at 29-years old, too young to be a Senator, received a call saying his wife and daughter had been killed in an accident, and later survived two cranial aneurysms [http://www.neurosurgerytoday.org/what/patient_e/cranial.asp]. Biden looked away through a window of a door he was standing near, while his sister told this story.
Owens was funny and impassioned about her brother, but as promised she didn't lift him up to be larger than life. She lifted him up to be a trooper.
When Biden took the podium he said he thought that this was the most important election in people's life span. He reinforced the fact that Pakistan is a threat--"a population larger than Russia--a state in a state of chaos, with nuclear capabilities... And here we are worrying about Iran developing a nuclear weapon sometime in the future. Pakistan is where Osama Bin Laden lives." He talked about his habit of getting things done while others are talking about it, and he invoked his participation in writing the Violence Against Women Act [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Against_Women_Act] "While others talked I got it done."
He asked the room to consider which candidate they wanted to go up against the Republican nominee, which candidate they thought wasn't going to be vulnerable to charges of not being tough enough against terrorism? "I have done more than Rudy Guilliani ever thought about terrorism. Who do you want to go up against Mike Huckabee and his family values?"
"I have had it up to here," Biden said, making a cutting gesture across his throat, with people telling me about my family values," and here he hit a nerve because people started applauding and whistling and it was impossible to hear what he said next and he had to shout. By the time the clapping and whistling finally died out he was still shouting. Before the volume is adjusted to account for the new silence the last phrase shouted was "and I would like to know where in the Gospel it says torture is OK."
Biden said, "On caucus night if you stand up for Joe Biden, you will be surprised at how many people stand up next to you," and I thought from conversations I had been overhearing, he was right, but at our caucus he didn't even come close to being viable.
And now maybe he is.
Before we had two nominees, everywhere I went-- train trips, coffee shops, airport--I overheard people talking about the election, excitedly. And then the conversation died down. The last time I overheard anything about the election was in O'Hare airport a couple months ago, where a young woman and an older woman were bemoaning the state of the world. "I think it will get better after the election," said the young woman. " I don't know if McCain will be able to fix everything," said the older woman.
And in a few months, so many sad things have happened within the Democratic party-- Ted Kennedy's brain tumor, the John Edwards mess, Stephanie Tubbs Jones death-- that it seems like the Democratic convention could be as funereal as celebratory.
It's almost as if all we have to look forward to now are the vice-presidential picks, and so the kitchen table and the coffee shop conversations pick up again. At the point I'm writing this, I guess only a few people know who is going to be the vice-presidential nominee for the Democrats and I'm not sure if anyone knows who is going to be the Republican nominee. I think I stand with my mother (she is often right) in thinking that the winning ticket for Obama would include Clinton, but I also include my thoughts that if it isn't Clinton, what McCain should do to ensure a win, is put Condoleezza Rice on his ticket. Someone needs to do something unexpected.
"Is she pro-life?" my father said. "That's all they care about."
And my last thought is this: I came out of the Warren County Administrative building not exactly a Joe Biden supporter but as an American who was proud he was in the Senate, and while I don't think picking him would be the best game plan choice, he is still a candidate of which Democrats could be proud.