Today’s morning briefing newsletter from The New York Times has what I’ll just say by way of introduction is an “interesting” take on why during the 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama back chose Joe Biden to be his running mate.
When he was running for president, Barack Obama knew he was a standard-bearer of change and was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. So he turned to Joe Biden, a running mate who would provide the experience he lacked.
Sure, right, okay. The “too much” “change” that Obama’s candidacy was asking from certain voters was about “experience”, hence Biden.
It couldn’t have been because he “wanted someone white and from the political mainstream, recognizing that the high drama of his candidacy would probably make any running mate a reassuring afterthought”, or have anything to do with Biden’s, um, “working-class background”, or even about Obama being “deeply worried about a backlash against a black man at the top of the ticket, and believed that an older white running mate would ease fears”.
That last one? It literally comes from the very article that the Times’ morning briefing newsletter is talking about with its bizarrely innocuous language of “change” and “experience”.