Jake Tapper, hardest working man in the 08 cycle, continues his coverage of the ever declining mental faculties of Joe Biden, Senator. For all the coverage given the family affairs of Governor Sarah Palin, precious little has been given to the rambling, bizarre statements of Smilin’ Joe Biden since his convention speech. And there’s so much good stuff here, too! Just the other day in Florida, for example, where he went on a 75 minute riff:

The evening was full of Biden-isms, including the inevitable Obama/Osama slip, made when Biden was discussing the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border “where Obama, Osama Bin Laden lives, and Obama wants to go to get him.”

Look, we know you want to keep pretending Biden is going to stop flubbing this, but he’s not. He may keep doing it all the way into the second year of an Obama term. And a lot more, too:

At another moment, he said, “when I hear people say, ‘Hey Joe, geez, I understand your values. I connect with you. But I don’t know about that other guy.’ Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. If Barack Obama grew up in my neighborhood in Scranton or Claymont or Wilmington, Delaware, he would have been the guy who had my back. If Barack Obama had grown up in my neighborhood, he would have been the same guy he is now.

“I’ve got to tell you, I’m tired,” Biden continued. “Let me tell you. If you’re looking for a very sophisticated, Harvard graduate who went to Columbia undergrad and was president of the Law Review, he’s totally intellectual. Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This guy is steel. This guy is steel, and I assure you that.”

Tapper makes the obvious point that Obama-Biden isn’t exactly in need of solidification of the people who want a sophisticated Law Review Harvard-Columbia intellectual in the office. That already exists. You might have heard of their party.

At another point, Biden riffed on being the older presence on the ticket, saying, “my role in this campaign is I’m the old man. I really thought I was still in pretty good shape. But I watched when they, when Barack, as they say, ‘rolled out,’ his, his, Vice President nominee. Half of the people in America thought I was going to get ‘rolled out.’ I don’t know. And I was listening to one of the news broadcasts after we had that great event in Springfield, Illinois, and there…was a runway to get up to the, to get up to the microphone from the door we came out. And I came out, and it was a long way away, I didn’t want to hold people up, so I started jogging. Next morning, I listen, I think it was Gwen Ifill, who I love, Gwen Ifill said, you know, something to the effect that, ‘It was a great speech, but Biden shouldn’t run.’ I thought, What are you talking about I shouldn’t run? What do you mean I shouldn’t run? So, you know, I don’t like young guys anymore.”

I don’t have any idea what the last part means.

Wow, what a coup by McCain. I didn’t know he had it in him.

Following on Jonah’s heels:

Sarah Palin makes this election about three things for John McCain:

• -Energy: She’s our best spokesperson on this issue, hands down.
• -Life: She’s HARDCORE pro-life, and she’s lived it - as we all know, giving birth to a Down’s Syndrome child.
• -The War: Palin’s eldest son enlisted on 9/11 anniversary. Now both members of the GOP ticket have sons serving in the Middle East.

What a shock, and what an excellent way to reclaim the momentum in this campaign.

FOX News confirms.

1. Yawn.

2. Smallest upside. Smallest downside.

3. What a difference two years makes for Pawlenty. To go from winning reelection in 2006 by 1% - aided by an embarrassing outburst from his opponent five days before the election - to the Vice Presidential nomination is a big jump.

4. That said, Pawlenty is a capable executive, has a nice blue collar background (slightly inflated by the Sam’s Club meme), is solidly pro-life with a good evangelical political base, and is significantly more experienced than Obama. In all, he represents the future winning coalition for the GOP (or rather, if it can reach middle class Latinos along with the white working class, it’ll be a winning coalition).

5. This pick shows that McCain doesn’t believe he needs to freaking impress anyone. He’d rather pick someone he likes personally, someone who is ethically sound, represents a blue state, and will not offend any significant niche of the base - in other words, McCain’s passing on testing the boundaries of political history.

6. Pawlenty truly likes and admires McCain. But one wonders if this pick would’ve gone differently had Mark Sanford chosen to endorse McCain, and support him in South Carolina, earlier this year.

7. If you had asked who the likeliest VP choices would’ve been prior to this primary, Sanford and Pawlenty would’ve led the list. After all the other names being thrown around, it says something about the incentive to pick an executive (in an otherwise all-Senate year) that one of them ended up with it.

8. Pawlenty is a better pick than Romney, certainly a better pick than any of the KBH/Ridge pro-aborts, and a marginally better pick than a roll of the dice like Palin. It lacks any of the sex appeal of Joementum (and this is the first and last time “sex appeal” and “Joe Lieberman” will appear in any proximity to each other), but neither does it have any of Lieberman’s very real negatives. I will still believe that Cantor would’ve been a better choice, but we’ll just see what his future holds.

9. McCain clearly believes that Obama-Biden is self-destructing - weighted down under their own hubris and a campaign staffed by people who know how to win small-money caucuses, not big-money general elections. And he won’t interfere with that pattern by going outside of the box.

10. But if he wants to contend for 2012-16, Pawlenty needs to bring back the mullet.

I’m prepared to support Lieberman as the choice over some of the alternatives.

The advantage of Lieberman is that he goes away after four years - there’s no chance he’s contending for the presidency. This makes him have a higher upside than any of the other potential pro-choice selections - KBH (I turned it down six times! SIX TIMES!), Meg Whitman, Ridge, etc.

So much for that text message announcement. Obama really should’ve done it earlier - this afternoon at the latest. All he’s done now is piss off the morning papers by making them miss their deadline, and given the networks a scramble for Saturday morning. How very throwback to think you could avoid the internet attention - but then, they got what they wanted in millions more phone numbers. And the biggest winner of the day is big Telco. Hooray!

So what can we say about the choice? I must admit that I, like Jonah Goldberg it appears, have always had a soft spot for Joe Biden. He’s actually a lot like John McCain in his blunt personality, albeit without the history of heroism behind it, which forms a package some find entertaining and others abrasive.

He certainly fits Obama’s Cheneyesque goal in a choice, which is why I thought Biden was the likeliest selection this morning. (I get few “I told you so” moments, so allow me this one.) In the end, Obama wasn’t interesting in breaking down any political traditions by going for a dark horse, going courageous with Clinton or pissing off the netroots with Bayh or even swinging for a state with a targeted pick like Kaine - he just wanted an old white guy who’s been around Washington forever. And lo and behold, he found one!

Biden is a “reassure people” pick, not a Hope pick, and certainly not a Change pick. Say it with me now, and know it is one of the first times you’ve heard it said about Joe Biden without an accompanying snicker: GRAVITAS. Such a ludicrous word it’s become if it can be applied to this fellow, who is in so many ways an uninspiring Washington politician - an ornery chap who likes women a bit too much for his own good, a horrible liar during the Clarence Thomas hearings (and during a few others too), and yes, all of it coming with an ego the size of Jupiter.

What’s more, for a man who’s supposed to bring vast tracts of foreign policy experience to the table, he’s really more of a shoot from the hip type - take this TNR anecdote for example:

At the Tuesday-morning meeting with committee staffers, Biden launches into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about what his committee should be doing, before he finally admits the obvious: “I’m groping here.” Then he hits on an idea: America needs to show the Arab world that we’re not bent on its destruction. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Biden declares. He surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face.

The staffers sit in silence. Finally somebody ventures a response: “I think they’d send it back.” Then another aide speaks up delicately: “The thing I would worry about is that it would almost look like a publicity stunt.” Still another reminds Biden that an Iranian delegation is in Moscow that very day to discuss a $300 million arms deal with Vladimir Putin that the United States has strongly condemned. But Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. He’s already moved on to something else.

So why do I still kind of like the man? Well, if I had to explain it, my view would come down to this:

Joe Biden does not believe that America is a bad idea.

This fact, of course, separates him from most liberal Democrats. Including Michelle Obama. And that is a good thing.

Well, now that Barack Obama is calling the unlucky ones, we’re running out of time to do the last fun speculation thing prior to the election, and I still haven’t thrown up a post of significance about all this. So here goes.

On Obama’s side, it seemed clear from the beginning that he was going to bollix this choice. It tends to prove the old dictum that As hire As and Bs hire Cs - his roster of potential choices, if accurate, is just not that impressive. The Mark Warners of the world took themselves out of the running early on, and the second tier of Jim Webbs did it later - either not confident that Obama will win, or more likely, unwilling to play second fiddle to The One for the foreseeable future. Others, like Wes Clark, took themselves out of the running just by opening their mouths and forming the shapes of their thoughts.

So instead, you ended up with a list of also-rans and secondary characters: the marvelously entertaining gaffe machine Joe Biden, a constituency-lacking mediocre governor in Tim Kaine (who, as Erick notes, is probably out), an uninspiring Kathleen Sebelius, and a rejected by the netroots pro-war Evan Bayh. Out of these, I think Biden is the likeliest choice.

None of these individuals are game changers, and the only remaining potential one who would change the game is Hillary.

I don’t buy Ruffini’s argument that this is all one massive headfake, but honestly, it’d make the most political sense if you want to win. Obama would have to be prepared with 4,383+ fanatical followers to serve as his taste testers, of course. And they’d have to have their wills in order. And she’d still want to run again.

Of course, I think the most obvious choice for Obama is to follow the Dick Cheney path - no, not the old white guy who’s been around politics forever, but to pick the head of your Veep Committee. In this case, that would be none other than Caroline Kennedy.

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Despite Rick Moran’s hopes, and those of others here at RS, Gov. Bobby Jindal reiterated that he will not be John McCain’s Veep choice.

“Let me be clear: I have said in every private and public conversation, I’ve got the job that I want. And I’ll say again on air: I’m not going to be the vice presidential nominee or vice president. I’m going to help Senator McCain get elected, as governor of Louisiana,” Jindal said.

“I look forward to continuing to be governor of Louisiana. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve our state. We’ve cut six taxes but we’ve got a lot more work to do right here in Louisiana. … I’ve never talked to the senator about the vice presidency or his thoughts on selecting the vice president.”

This is the right choice for Louisiana, and we should be glad of it. There’s just too much work to be done there at this time.