360DigitalInfluence

Funny story re: THE text.  A friend of mine is a Midwestern African-American Democrat who is a huge Obama supporter.  She  worked for Obama in South Carolina and Indiana and is currently flying out to Denver.  Her boyfriend is a former Democratic House staffer now in the private sector here in Washington.  He’s also an Obama supporter, but a little more cynical about the Senator’s path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. She went out Friday night and then went to bed at a decent hour.  He stayed at home and  was watching cable news.  She woke him up at 3 AM saying, “I got the text!  It’s Biden.”  He replied with his usual withering sarcasm, “I know dear, it’s been known since about midnight.”  According to him, she sounded quite deflated.

Now this story is much funnier if you know the two of them and I had to leave out a number of details to protect their identities (and to clean up the language) … but there is a point here.  The announcement of Joe Biden as Obama’s vice-presidential candidate was a great stunt, mitigated by the fact that choice was widely known and reported several hours before someone pushed send on the text message when most recipients were in bed.  In this case, those who signed up were NOT the first to know.

As for the selection itself, I think it is too soon to tell.  Biden’s first appearance yesterday was a good one, but the challenge will be how well Biden can stay on message and keep it short.  While groups such as Media Matters will attempt to argue the Kinnock plagarism story was overblown or Jamie Rubin will try to explain to anti-War liberals why his former boss and Obama voted in different ways about Iraq,  I think the bigger story is that much of the media will now be on Biden gaffe watch.  For better or worse, in a media environment where every vocal misstep is twittered, blogged and uploaded to YouTube, Obama “status quo” pick may not be so safe after all.  I wonder what the over/under is until Biden has his first “Macaca moment.”

Finally, me thinks the NetRoots (Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, The Washington Note, etc…) protest too much about Ron Fournier’s analysis of the Biden selection.  The piece, linked above, is clearly labelled analysis — something that the Associated Press has done more of in recent years in an attempt to be more edgy and stay relevant in the age of the Web.  Fournier’s analysis is that Biden was a safe pick designed to shore up a perceived weakness and be willing to be fill the traditional vice presidential role as the attack dog.  It was and he is.