Biden may be in office but I would have gone for Hillary

While most of us have been wondering whether John McCain will be able to remember, let alone find, the White House should he win the presidency, Barrack Obama has been out there making Senator Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

Biden, a three-term Senator from Delaware, himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987, fell out after he was caught cribbing from the speeches of other politicians. Hopefully nothing off Dunder Mifflin’s leading politician Dwight Schrute in NBC’s The Office. The show is based in Scranton, PA, birthplace of Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) the absurdly pathetic regional manager and coincidentally also Senator Joe Biden.

It doesn’t bode well — will Biden usher in a new era of American politics?

If he’s anything like Scranton’s other favourite son he’ll certainly be ushering in something. Scott, at the wedding of Phyllis, one of Dunder Mifflin’s employees, was convinced that as the usher he was the high point of the occasion rather than the bride and groom. He becomes so obnoxious that they are forced to evict him from the event. Sort of like party leaders finding out you’ve been cribbing from other politicians’s speeches … but I digress.

The US electorate are now going to have to choose between a candidate who can’t remember how many houses he has, where they are or why he should be in the one he’s in right now, and a candidate who has just co-opted the man from Scranton.

Of course, the reason why Obama selected Biden was to bolster his foreign-policy credentials and raise the level of experience at the top of the ticket. Problem is, if Biden starts cribbing foreign policy off other politicians who’s to say he won’t copy the wrong ones? What if he starts quoting from Mugabe on race relations, Ahmadinejad on nuclear proliferation and George Bush on … well, anything?

We could land up once again with everyone daily checking up on the health of the president as we did when Dan Quayle was the vice-president. Remember how much we revered George H Bush? We knew that his continued health was protecting the planet from a fate worse than death — Quayle. It’s a good thing Obama is young and the picture of health because he might well be doing a George H for us.

In essence, I would rather Obama had gone for Hillary. While I am no great fan of the former first lady I do believe that she would have provided the experience as well as uniting voters behind the Democratic ticket. Biden’s selection, as early polls suggest, has not improved Obama’s ratings.

Which means that if McCain gets it right on his selection this may well prove to be a turning point in this year’s race.

Heaven forbid.