Obama Election Watch

Most agree that Barack Obama made a good choice in selecting Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden’s long experience in the Senate, his impressive foreign policy credentials, his Catholic faith, and working-class background all fill holes in Obama’s resume.

Now the question is, how can Biden provide fresh voter appeal heretofore missing in the Obama campaign?

Obama has always had a serious problem relating to working-class voters. His replies to Pastor Rick Warren last week were long, tendentious, and skillfully nuanced. McCain, on the other hand, gave crisp and definitive answers to unanswerable questions. End result: It didn’t matter who was speaking closer to the truth. Obama sounded like a pointy-headed intellectual who blue-collar voters like to mock and McCain gets praised for his certainty and quick thinking.

Joe Biden comes from a working-class background. Even though he is famed for running off at the mouth, he knows how to talk tough and give straight answers that working-class voters like to hear.

Biden should be put to work in the working-class cities and towns of western and central Pennsylvania, in the industrial cities of Ohio, and the working-class neighborhoods of Michigan. Biden’s down-home style and a reputation for straight talk will appeal to voters in these areas.

Biden has the skill and personality that can give flesh to the soaring rhetoric of Obama, a smart and highly educated man who has not yet successfully reminded blue-collar voters that he was raised by an impoverished single mother who needed to use food stamps.