VICE–PRESIDENTS have only one task but it is an important one – they are but a heartbeat away from the most powerful job in the world. It is this reality that makes Americans take so much notice when a candidate picks a VP, hence the intense interest in Barack Obama's choice of Senator Joe Biden as his running-mate.
For Obama, as much as for John McCain who is expected to pick his VP at the end of the week, the key issue in the choice of VP is not what happens when in office, but how this choice can help them get there in the first place.
Conventional wisdom
has it that a VP is chosen for having all the qualities the candidate himself lacks. For Obama, young, black, untried, Biden, 65, brings age, whiteness and 30 years of Senate experience.
As chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, Biden can help Obama bridge the biggest poll gap with McCain, which is over who is best trusted to guide America through a troubled world.
As a bonus, Biden is also a Catholic – a quality Obama hopes will sweep up the millions of blue-collar whites who went for Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
Even Biden's reputation for shooting his mouth off is an advantage: Obama's campaign is built around "change" but though Biden has been in the Senate three decades, he can be portrayed as an outsider.
"For decades, he has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn't changed him," Obama said this weekend.
Another advantage sure to be tapped is that Biden, senator for Delaware, hails from Pennsylvania, one of the key states in the November election.
In fact, the white-haired Biden has many similarities to McCain: both are mavericks with long years in the Senate, and both have harrowing personal narratives. For McCain it was his years as a PoW in Vietnam, for Biden it was having his wife and daughter killed in a car crash on the eve of his 1972 election to the Senate. Both men have sons who serve: McCain's son has just returned from Iraq, while Biden's son is expected to deploy there this year.
Commentators quickly branded Biden as Obama's "attack dog" willing to say things the candidate would rather not, and he has not disappointed.
Within hours of being appointed, he laid into John McCain's admission that he owns seven homes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine. You sit there at night ... after you put the kids to bed and you talk, you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's not a worry John McCain has to worry about. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at," Biden said.
McCain called Biden a "wise selection," but said he believed there was still plenty to criticise.
"I know that Joe will campaign well for Senator Obama, and so I think he's going to be very formidable," McCain told CBS News. "I've always respected Joe Biden, but I disagreed with him from the time he voted against the first Gulf War to his position where he said you had to break Iraq up into three different countries. We really have different approaches to many national security issues."
McCain, meanwhile, is driven by the same logic in trying to find a VP to fill in the gaps, in his case the fact that he is elderly and rich.
Complicating McCain's choice is the fact that he, like Obama, is an outsider propelled into the nomination, and both men are fighting hard among a shifting, uncertain electorate.
"From a historical standpoint the map is changing," said CNN commentator Roland Martin. "McCain, competing in blue states, Obama is competing in red states; they are rewriting history every single day."
Red states are traditionally Republican, blue, Democrat.
McCain can appoint the pro-business conservative Mitt Romney, he of the laser eyes, to build support among the right, but this might be at the price of alienating the liberals among the swing voters, particularly if Romney calls for abortion to become illegal. For this reason McCain may plump for the less controversial, younger and more liberal Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.
What Biden and McCain's unnamed choice would do once in office is a big question, as modern times have shattered precedents. Dick Cheney, the current vice-president, is by common consent the true power in the White House, running things on a day-to-day basis.
It was his voice that emerged during the recent Georgia crisis with Russia, albeit briefly, but nevertheless as the true sound of American bellicosity.
Before him was Al Gore who was effectively put out to pasture by the "co-presidency" of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Biden would be likely to take a close interest in foreign affairs, but may find himself treading on the toes of whoever Obama picked as Secretary Of State. Less remarked on is how the choice of Biden confirms that Obama is set on a political "smash and grab" against the Republicans.
For if Obama is to win the White House, he will do it by responding to the conservative mood that is sweeping America.
Americans are sick of the Bush administration by a majority of four to one, but they are not necessarily opposed to the Republican ideal. In times of trouble – such as now, with recession looming and a continuing war in Iraq – Americans gravitate to the Republicans for a sense of prudence and simplicity.
Obama has already shown signs of stealing the key Republican mantra – that of personal responsibility – out from under them.
He has urged African-Americans to replace a culture of victimhood with one of responsibility, and has also called for a fiscal responsibility conspicuously missing from the Bush administration.
While a political liberal, Obama is also a social conservative, and Biden's tub-thumping rhetoric springs from the same well.
Even their insistence that America drops its go-it-alone stance and courts allies to better deal with foes is in tune not just with past Democrat administrations but with Henry Kissinger, a Republican Secretary of State from an earlier age.
Biden will have the job in the coming months of reassuring voters that Obama has wisdom and judgment despite his youth and inexperience. With the Democrat's polling numbers continuing to fall against McCain, it will be a tough job.
But if Biden succeeds, he will expect to do as much work, or as little, if both men find themselves in the White House come January.
Four different leaders and four different approachesLYNDON Johnson (Dem): Propelled to office in 1963 by the assassination of John F Kennedy, Johnson was elected in his own right the following year and introduced a raft of reforms including health care for the poor and elderly and race-equality legislation. But Johnson was also responsible for escalating the war in Vietnam and suffered accordingly: By 1968, wildly unpopular and riddled with heart disease, he became the first sitting president not to seek re-election.
Richard "Dick" Cheney (Rep): The most powerful vice-president ever and viewed as the true power in the White House. Cheney's greatest achievement was launching the Iraq invasion in the teeth of international opposition, and that war, now in its sixth year, is also his greatest failure. Declared that he would not run for president.
Dan Quayle (Rep): By general consensus the worst vice-presidential choice in recent times, he was picked to add youth and sparkle to the successful George Bush snr campaign in 1988. But when he compared himself in a vice-presidential debate to JFK he became the victim of widespread ridicule. In office, the ridicule continued after a series of gaffes that included: "We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward." When Bush lost to Clinton in 1992 Quayle left the political stage.
Al Gore (Dem): Gore was appointed by Bill Clinton to present a double-dose of youth and freshness in 1992. But once in office, Clinton gave his wife Hillary a cabinet post and Gore was sidelined. He supported, and later erroneously claimed credit for creating, the internet, and took an interest in green issues. But if he was a failure in office, he later prospered winning both an Oscar and the Nobel Peace prize for his work on the environment.
The full article contains 1426 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
