Joe Biden: Dead Man Walking

Joe Biden said today that Hillary Clinton “might have been a better pick than me” to be Barack Obama’s running mate. Is Biden trying to tell us something? If nothing else, he's telling us point-blank that McCain's pick of Sarah Palin was a stroke of genius. Since the announcement of Palin as John McCain's running mate, Joe Biden has been all but lost in the swirl of media attention surrounding the Alaskan governor.

So where does that leave Biden? He sounds like somebody who can see the writing on the wall, and is just waiting for the hammer to fall... on his head. For Barack Obama to ditch Biden would not be unprecedented in presidential politics...

McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton to be his running mate in 1972 without doing a thorough background check, only to find out that Eagleton had been hospitalized in the past, that he was taking Thorazine (a powerful anti-psychotic), and that two of Eagleton's doctors both expressed grave concerns about his mental health. On August 1, 1972, Eagleton withdrew at McGovern's request and was replaced by Ted Kennedy's in-law Sargent Shriver.

Granted, Joe Biden's situation is nowhere near as desperate as Eagleton's was. Nevertheless, consider for a moment what Obama has been willing to do previously in this campaign...

He said of his incendiary pastor Jeremiah Wright, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother." Yet, Obama did just that and threw Jeremiah Wright under the bus as a matter of political expediency.

When it appeared that James A. Johnson (head of Obama's VP search committee) was becoming a liability because he had received a favorable loan from Countrywide Financial, Obama threw Johnson under the bus and forced him to resign.

Obama threw his own grandmother under the bus, calling her a “typical white person,” in the context of holding racial prejudices, and he threw Pennsylvanians under the bus before a group of wealthy backers in San Francisco.

In fact, as soon as Obama sewed up the Democratic nomination, he even threw his left-wing base under the bus in order to appear more "centrist".

Quite simply, Obama knows how to throw people under the bus. As Mayor Rudy Giuliani said at the Republican National Convention, "if I were Joe Biden, I'd want to get that V.P. thing in writing." Well, if I were Joe Biden, I wouldn't want to walk near a bus stop with Barack Obama.