Biden!

Great choice. I refer my reader(s) to Al Giordano:

[A]s the national media vetting process will disclose in the coming days, after 36 years in the US Senate, he's still one of the poorest US Senators: he never availed himself of the back-door personal enrichment techniques that most of his colleagues - Democrat and Republican - have utilized. Beyond class resentment, he retains a sense of class solidarity. His wife since 1977 never went into Washington lobbying: she remained a public schoolteacher.

Biden has also lived personal tragedies that would have splat most people like watermelons tossed from the sixth floor of a Wilmington tenement: between his first US Senate election in 1972 and being sworn in, his first wife and three small children were in a gruesome car accident. Mrs. Biden and his daughter died, his two boys were wounded, and he became a single father. Biden never quite entered the Washington DC culture so seductive to his peers: commuting from Delaware to DC, always coming home at night.

...Yes, I would have preferred the "three point shot" - that Obama pick a running mate from outside of Washington - but as DC insiders go, it's interesting that Biden chose all these years to refuse to live inside it, or meet with its lobbyists.

Obama stopped at the three point line, passed the ball to the new muscle man with the sharp elbows, and put two points on the board instead. I can live with that. And my working class soul is actually looking forward to the populist campaign that will come out of the unlikely alliance of two guys from humble beginnings against the owners of this coal mine called America.

I love Al's coal-mine analogy; love Biden's populist roots. It's a tough sell in Delaware (home of more Banks, Insurance Companies and Corporate headquarters than any state in the nation), but he's made it work since 1977.

He's smart, he's experienced, and he's not afraid to lay the smack-down. I would take a slightly different cut at the basketball analogy to add that Biden is a three point play: three the hard way. He can draw the foul, then make them pay.

And I'm also left with this: who do the Republics answer with? Biden has them beat in foreign policy and domestically. He has them beat on moral grounds and with gravitas. I don't see a guy on the other side of the aisle who is a fail-safe response. It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Go ahead and read Al's whole take: Second Chance for the Everyman. As one of his commenters said, this is a "brass knuckles" choice by Obama.

Oh, and this made me laugh:

Biden has a reputation for shooting from the hip, as he did when he called President Bush "brain-dead" while campaigning for Sen. John Kerry. Republicans were outraged by his comments, but since Biden had also called former Democratic president Clinton brain-dead, many people dismissed the GOP's criticism.