As I'm sure everyone already knows by now, yesterday Obama announced that Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) is his pick for the Vice President slot on his ticket. Joe Biden is a long-time Senator known for his long-windedness, occasional gaffe-proneness, and above all his boundless knowledge and experience with foreign policy. One can see the attraction for Obama of the latter quality. His relative inexperience compared to other candidates on foreign policy matters is considered a weakness that he would like to be able to shore up. By why select someone with obvious flaws when there are others who could fill the same gap?

The reasons are the lesser-known qualities of Joe Biden. Biden is one of the poorest members of the Senate, and grew up in a working-class, Catholic family in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Even to this day, he doesn't maintain a residence in Washington, but instead rides the train to work and back from Delaware every day. The implication of this background is clear: Joe Biden is not someone who can be portrayed as an "elitist" the way Republicans have been trying to paint Obama all campaign. Biden is about as down-to-earth as a Senator can be, and he is going to be used to go around to those Clinton voters in Appalachia who have been slow to come around to Obama and tell them that Obama understands their problems, and they can trust Biden because he is one of them. Typically the Vice President doesn't pull a lot of votes on his own unless he is from a smaller, generally ignored state, but the Obama campaign is betting that Biden can be an effective surrogate for them with that bloc of voters.

The other lesser-known quality of Biden that undoubtedly appealed to Obama was his skills as a debater and an attack dog. Biden is formidable in debates, as anyone who watched what little time he was given during the primaries can attest. He is responsible for some of the most memorable lines of those debates ("Yes," and "A noun, a verb, and 9/11"). He will be extremely effective in taking attacks to John McCain this fall, as evidenced by these quotes from his speech yesterday:

"You sit at your kitchen table and worry about how to pay the bills. That's not something John McCain has to worry about. He worries about which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at. "

"Ladies and gentlemen, the reckoning is now... these times require more than a good soldier, they need a wise leader."

Biden is not hesitant to go after McCain hard, and he will likely be able to shred whoever his opponent will be in the VP debate (I'm predicting Romney). This combination of factors: Biden's working-class background, his debating skills, and his willingness to play attack dog, along with a healthy dose of media admiration for the man, clearly outweighed any potential negatives the Obama camp saw with him.

I'm inclined to like this pick. Biden would not have been my first choice. I would have likely gone with someone like Gen. Wesley Clark, who is also a great attack dog, certainly holds his own every time I see him on TV, and would have had the additional advantage of being someone clearly outside of Washington. But Clark would have been a risky pick for the notoriously risk-averse Obama campaign because of the grand hissy-fit McCain's camp threw over his comments earlier in the summer that getting shot down doesn't qualify you to be President. Of the four candidates who made the short list (Biden, Sebelius, Bayh, and Kaine), Biden was probably the best. He's not horribly boring and questionably hawkish like Bayh, he's not centrist and ineffectual like Kaine has been, and he's not the complete unknown that Sebelius is. Overall, I think the Obama campaign made a good decision here, and hopefully Biden's speech Wednesday night will convince the country of it as well.

-David Kleppinger, Morons.org Political Analyst