Biden brings vast experience, a history of verbal blunders

Joe and Jill Biden prepared to depart their home yesterday in Greenville, Del., to join Barack Obama in Illinois. (Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press)

WASHINGTON - Over nearly four decades on the national stage, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware has earned a uniquely contradictory image - part statesman, part gaffe-maker - and so it is no surprise that his selection as Barack Obama's running mate can be assessed in similar terms.

On the one hand, Biden is one of the very few Democratic leaders with unassailable foreign policy experience - including both a measured understanding of the world and the confidence to make bold proposals, such as his much-discussed plan to partition Iraq. So he must be viewed as a substantive addition to the ticket.

On the other hand, his sometimes embarrassing attempts to discredit Obama during the primaries - memorably describing him as the first "clean" black candidate - are sure to resonate with voters in a way that reflects badly on both halves of the Democratic ticket.

And the Obama campaign's handling of the selection - building suspense for an instant text-message to its legions of supporters, to underscore its 21st-century prowess - fizzled in the end, as news leaked out through conventional means in the wee hours of the morning.

The future can wait - as seems to be evidenced by both the selection of the 65-year-old Biden and the handling of the announcement.

The whole drama - concluding with a joint appearance yesterday at which Biden called Obama "Barack America" and Obama initially introduced Biden as the next president of the United States - raised the uncomfortable thought that the Democratic ticket could be as gaffe-prone as its vice presidential nominee has been in his worst moments.

That would, of course, be unfair to Biden, who has been a central figure in some of the most important judicial and foreign policy conflicts of recent decades.

He was the calm in the storm of the Robert Bork hearings 21 years ago, wielding his gavel as chairman of the Judiciary Committee with fairness to both sides. He was again in the eye of a hurricane with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court four years later. And recently, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has been a central figure in probing the Iraq war.

In performing each of these functions, he received widespread praise. But as he himself acknowledged earlier this year, he has an unfortunate penchant for digressions, most recently when he set heads scratching on the Judiciary Committee by consuming long minutes of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings to discuss his long-dead grandfather's gripes about Alito's alma mater, Princeton University.

Part of the problem is that Biden loves to talk. He is perhaps the most omnipresent senator on Sunday morning talk shows, perched inevitably with a view of the Capitol over his shoulder.

It is that image, for better or worse, that defines his choice as Obama's VP. In picking an old Washington hand - perhaps the definitive old Washington hand - Obama is seeking to offset his own perceived vulnerabilities. It is an acknowledgment that youth and inexperience are potentially troublesome issues for him.

"The thing that Biden brings to the ticket is not regional balance or ideological or gender balance, or strength on a particular issue, but experiential balance," said Linda Fowler, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. "I think the Obama people have been looking at the polls showing that people who don't feel like they know much about this candidate have doubts about his experience."

There is some evidence to buttress Obama's thinking. The main liability with Biden - assuming that he doesn't produce more distracting gaffes - is that his presence on the ticket undermines Obama's message of hope and generational change.

But Obama obviously realizes that undecided voters are unlikely to be swayed by the politics of hope. More likely, they feel sympathetic to Obama on a range of issues but have questions about his readiness to lead, particularly on foreign policy.

These doubts seem to have come into sharper relief in recent weeks, as John McCain seized on Russia's invasion of Georgia to offer a preview of his crisis management, and uncertainty over the leadership of Pakistan spurred renewed concerns about the security of that country's nuclear arsenal.

In some respects, the 2008 election is playing out like the 1980 race, in which the state of the country argued strongly against the party in power, but in which there were serious doubts about the foreign policy steadiness of the other party's nominee, despite - or, perhaps, because of - his obvious charisma.

In 1980, the standard-bearer for the party out of power was Ronald Reagan, who was neck-and-neck in the polls for most of the year with President Carter, though the voters seemed eager for change. Once Reagan defused the doubts about him - mostly through a strong debate performance, and by choosing an experienced vice presidential nominee, George H. W. Bush - he cruised to victory.

Obama is obviously hoping that Biden can provide some of the reassurance to moderate voters that Bush gave to Reagan's ticket.

Of course, by the same measure, Hillary Clinton, who far outperformed Biden in the presidential debates, might have offered greater reassurance, and an important bridge to women voters, to boot.

But apparently neither Obama nor Clinton, or both, could make the much-discussed Democratic "dream ticket" a reality. And if the Obama-Biden ticket goes down to defeat, Democratic second-guessing will focus less on whether Obama should have chosen a fresher face, such as Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, than on whether he chose the right old face.

Only Clinton and Obama know for sure whether there was another option.