Biden choice could be the solution — or bring a host of new problems

Someone once said that there’s a solution to every problem that’s simple, obvious — and wrong. The selection of Joe Biden as running mate by Barack Obama could be just such a solution.

Biden is a lot better than Hillary Clinton, the bitterness of whose supporters could not be cured by the No 2 spot on the ticket. Old political campaigners see Biden’s selection as smart, altogether. Strategic, don’t you know. Sound in its geography. Wise in its age contrast. Broad in its appeal, since Biden comes of Catholic working people who went down the coalmines of Pennsylvania, yet now has loads of money. Adds a touch of pathos, because of Biden’s overcoming of the childhood stutter that got him cruelly nicknamed “Joe B-B-B-Biden” and his raising of his family after the car crash that killed his wife and daughter. Balances the ticket, providing the international policy expertise and experience Obama’s perceived to be just a mite thin on.

Nobody’s saying “And white, too.” Nobody’s saying “You need a bit of down-and-dirty political nous to balance all that idealistic stuff Obama talks.” But that’s the subtext.

They’re right, of course. Of such practical politics was Camelot created. JFK was youth, excitement, new directions. Lyndon Johnson was down-and-dirty deep south practicality. The fact that the two men loathed each other was beside the point. Were Obama to be assassinated while in office — as the Clinton camp hinted might be a possibility — Biden could take over, as LBJ did, and keep the show on the road.

So he ran onto the platform at a rally in Illinois at the weekend, beaming and white-shirted, did Biden, to huge applause, following an introductory speech by Obama praising his running mate for his legislative track record of providing protection for abused women and defining his new partner as “a fundamentally decent man”.

Not all of the people who have helped to bring Obama to this point would instinctively describe Biden in quite those terms. They perceive themselves as having no choice but to swallow their considerable resentment at comments made earlier in their campaign by their new vice-presidential running mate. Like when he said Obama “wasn’t ready” for the presidency, a remark widely interpreted as meaning that America wasn’t ready for a black president. Like when he described Obama as “clean,” which was as offensive to Barack’s supporters as when another political figure praised him for being articulate: What, you don’t think a man with darker skin can scrub up and talk well? The Obama camp will have anticipated the way political media would parse their new partner’s past, starting with his financial supporters, which include MBNA, the credit card people. At a time when all banks and financial service providers are as popular as a severe dose of leprosy, this forced Biden’s people to come out with their man’s voting record, to prove he had never favoured his funders.

Which begs the question: Why then, are they funding him? The Associated Press this weekend also pointed out that “In August 2007, three men who later became entangled in a Mississippi bribery scheme raised money for senator Joe Biden’s run for president. A month later, two of the three were overheard in a phone call recorded by the FBI discussing federal legislation and a prospective meeting with Biden’s brother, Jim.”

The AP acknowledges that nobody knows whether that meeting ever happened. Biden’s camp has dismissed it as irrelevant.

“Joe Biden is the genuine article who has brought change to Washington without being changed by Washington,” Biden’s spokesman stated, adding, for good measure, that he has voted against drug companies, big oil and the organisations called HMOs which run far too much of the American healthcare system.

Some of the doubts expressed about Biden, in the nature of political life, may actually be advantageous. Take, for example, the fact that his son is a lobbyist for a university in Biden’s constituency, which has netted millions in state funds. Tsk, tsk, say the purists: too close for comfort. Not at all, say the pragmatists: demonstrates that this man brings to the Obama ticket the solid understanding of how to work the system, making Obama more, rather than less electable.

The one thing Biden demonstrably brings to the Obama campaign is balance in image and rhetoric. Where Obama talks wide-blue-yonder aspirations, Biden comes out with killer cracks, like the one he used to crease Rudi Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York who — briefly — parlayed his management in the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers into an international reputation.

“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence,” Biden memorably said of Giuliani. “A noun and a verb and 9/11. I mean, there’s nothing else.”

The difficulty attached to Biden’s oratory, of course, is the fact that, 20 years ago, he had to abandon his own presidential campaign when it emerged that he had nicked bits from a Neil Kinnock party political broadcast to beef up a speech he was making about the poverty and deprivation of his own background. In this newspaper, three years ago, I noted that it was marvellous, stirring stuff, delivered with passion and apparent spontaneity by Biden in a broadcast from the Iowa State Fair.

“I started thinking, as I was coming over here,” he confided, “why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university.”

A legitimate and evocative question. And also, in the minds of some journalists watching, not quite new. Some of them recalled something similar being said in a British Labour party political broadcast. They dug out the footage of that broadcast and found the same question, referred, in this instance, to Kinnock’s Welsh family history.

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a university?” the then Labour party leader had asked.

It wasn’t the only line carrying an echo of Kinnock. Biden talked admiringly about his ancestors going down into the coalmines of north-east Pennsylvania and coming up 12 hours later to play football, where Kinnock talked of his grandparents and great grandparents doing the same.

Biden exited the 1988 campaign in disgrace. Fair dues to him for resilience and recovery over the past two decades then. But Obama’s announcement speech was oddly off-key. It was filled with downward inflections. It ended with a painful slip of the tongue, where the presidential candidate said “Let me introduce to you the next president — the next vice-president — of America, Joe Biden.”

Biden’s addition to the Obama ticket may well be the clever move that gets both past the post. Or not.