Biden’s Cognitive Dissonance

Rich Lowry points out the cognitive dissonace that Obama’s choice of Biden creates.  First he notes how Biden conflicts with the central premises of Obama’s campaign:

Barack Obama has denigrated Washington experience, pooh-poohed traditional foreign-policy credentials and rued negative tit-for-tat exchanges in campaigns — in fact, these things were close to the core of Obama’s message during the past year. Note the past tense.

When it came time to choose a running mate, Obama went with a senator who has been in Washington for 35 years, who earned his foreign-policy chops in years of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings and Council on Foreign Relations meetings, and who is known for rhetorical belligerency. Plus, he voted for the Iraq War, the very lapse in judgment that is supposed to disqualify John McCain from the presidency.

He also wonders how Biden can touted as supremley qualified to be president without noting just how unprepared Obama is:

The theme of Obama’s (naturally quite fulsome) introduction of Biden in Springfield could have been “all the things I’m not”: a man who “has stared down dictators and spoken out for America’s cops and firefighters,” who is “one of America’s leading voices on national security,” who has “decades of steady work across the aisle,” and “who is ready to step in and be president.”

Listening to Obama tick off Biden’s accomplishments, one could wonder how it was logically possible for both these men to be ready to be president, the elder statesman and the neophyte who has been in the Senate less than four years, most of them spent campaigning for president. Obama also — in another defensive move — emphasized Biden’s lunch-bucket roots. As the scrappy kid from Oahu, Hawaii (“the most removed population center on the planet,” according to The Washington Post), Obama wants to squeeze every ounce of working-class street cred he can from Biden, the scrappy kid from Scranton, Pa.

I think Lowry and others are right this pick was a defensive move and undercuts much of the rationale behind Obama’s campaign.  Obama is clearly trying to use the favorable environment to his adavantage and run a low risk conventional campaign from here on out.

But I am not sure the voters want conventional out of Obama.  Yes, they want to be sure they can trust him, but the more he seems like just another the politician the less appealing he becomes.