So the pick is in. Finally.
Joseph Biden, sixty-five years old. A thirty-five year veteran of the Senate and a Roman Catholic liberal out of Delaware. Loquacious. Lunch bucket. Foreign relations. Comb-over. Scranton roots. Passionate. A Crest Whitestrips smile.
I had predicted Evan Bayh a few weeks ago, thinking that Obama would go with someone slightly younger. Close but no cigar. To me Bayh seemed like the perfect hybrid candidate---young enough yet experienced enough, liberal enough yet moderate enough, strong enough yet sensitive enough, Beltway enough yet Heartland enough. Plus, he was a Hillary guy. Party unity. A team of rivals.
Not to be.
I just looked at the clock. It's 1:40 a.m. on the west coast. I leave for Denver in roughly thirty-six hours.
I still haven't gotten my text message from Barack.
WTF, B.O.?
I woke up yesterday and my phone light was flashing. A political junkie buddy of mine, ringing in from Aspen. There was a voicemail message and a text message. I looked at the text message first.
It read: Hillary!!!
Immediately I turned on my computer to verify. Naturally there was nothing. In fact it was quite the opposite.
I dialed my friend.
"I'm up here in Aspen with some bigwigs," he told me. "Campaign staffers. High level. They say he picked her. It's done. It's a curveball."
"I don't think so," I said. "Drudge is running a lead story about how he didn't even vet her. It's all about what a slap in the face it is."
"I'm just telling you what I heard."
"Hillary?"
"Hillary."
I was stunned. Foggy. Incredulous.
"Who's your source on this?"
"Finance people," my buddy said. "It could be total bullshit. I'm not gonna say that I'm a hundred percent. But these guys sounded pretty convinced."
Finance people.
I had lunch with a couple of friends a few hours later: Kimmi and Jodyne. Kimmi is in town from New York. We were sitting at a sidewalk table in LA. It wasn't long before I gave them the story. Barack picks Hillary in a stunner.
Jodyne squealed, clapped her hands together, smiled. She had supported Hillary in the primaries and is a diehard Clintonista.
"This is the greatest thing ever!" she said.
"Don't quote me on that," I said. "It's totally unsubstantiated. Odds are it isn't even true."
But she wasn't really listening. Already she was lost inside her telephone, pounding out a text message to her sister.
"She's gonna be so excited," she said. "She's totally gonna freak."
"It's not a hundred percent," I said. "Tell her it's probably a joke."
"I'm telling her your name and that you're a thousand percent positive it's true."
"Tell her I'm just repeating what a friend told me. He's out in Aspen at a wedding, and he sounded incoherent. He was probably on something."
Obama-Biden 2008. Their triumphant march West begins
Monday, it's gavel-open on the Front Range. The party begins. And with it will come the persistent low-grade subplot, ripped from the pages of a mind-numbing soap opera. Obama and Clinton. The Clintons and Obama. Unsubstantiated rumors. Secondhand party gossip. Without question it will be among the favorite drunken parlor games of the conventioneering set. As much as the Obama camp is gonna try to shrug it off and turn the spotlight in another direction, everyone and their mother is gonna be speculating about the Clintons in their spare time.
What will the Clintons do? What have they said to Barack? What has he said to them? Do they hate each other? Will they sit next to each other at the lunch table? Did Hillary leave Barry a voicemail? Did Barry text Bill? Is it true that Bill almost challenged Barry to a fight?
And so on.
It's nice to believe that much of this is bogus, too...that the supposed animosity between the intra-party camps is criminally overblown by a news media desperate for advertising dollars and a Republican party all too happy to fan the flames.
Really though, this one seems to hold more than a grain of truth. Where there's smoke, there's actually fire.
I have no idea what the Clintons are going to do in Denver. Nobody does. That's part of the twisted fun.
Will it be anticlimactic? Probably.
But still the chess match remains. The subtext. The inflections. Word choice. Things left unsaid. Incredible levels of microscopic scrutiny.
Nothing the Clintons ever say or do is an accident. Dick Morris said that. A lot of people say that.
Dick Morris gives me the creeps.
Obama has made his move. Nothing he says or does is an accident, either.
Politics is the art of accident prevention.
And now here comes
(Get your crisis team ready, Mr. Axelrod.)
About an hour ago I got another text message from my friend.
Biden, he wrote. What do u think?
I told him I didn't think it was a bad pick. Could be much worse. Biden is fiery...seasoned. He knows how to land a punch. Worst case scenario, he's entertaining.
My buddy essentially agreed.
No word on what the Clintons think.
And no word from those finance guys.
Phenomenally exhausted already,
BL
Brad Listi is the author of the bestselling novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and the founder of TheNervousBreakdown.com, an online publication featuring writers from around the world. You can find him online at www.bradlisti.com as soon as his web designers finish working on the new site---which should happen any minute now.
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