Joe Biden

Watching Biden's Vice Presidential "acceptance" speech (which was great), the true wisdom of the Biden pick dawned on me; Obama now has real potential to successfully become a "working-class hero" candidate.

In the abstract, there was never anything to stop this from happening. Obama was born into poverty and a broken family. When people talk of how a humble upbringing increases a candidate's "values" or "character", what they usually mean is that having to fight for everything you ever got gives you a strong work ethic and a sense of what life is like for average working people. This theme is certainly there in Obama's life story.

But the archetypical "self-made man" in American folklore is one born to a mill worker out in the country, one whose daddy came home every night caked in sweat and grime but did his best to teach his boy good Christian values. Growing up in a black neighborhood in Chicago to a mother on welfare is no less challenging an environment, and it is no less remarkable that Obama has gotten to where he is. But many people, especially working-class white people, still seem to view his story as somehow antithetical to their own.

Enter Joe Biden. He completes the picture. I think that the very people whom Obama most needs to reach - people who are made nervous by some aspect of Obama's life story - will identify with Joe Biden. It will then be an easy step for them see Obama in a new light, as simply a different but equally important version of the same American story.

If McCain now caves to party pressure and selects Mitt Romney, he will have walked into a very dangerous trap. Nothing will be easier for the Democrats than to position Obama/Biden as the working-class answer to a McCain/Romney "silver-spoon" ticket.