Obama and Biden

Forty years ago, Americans still tuned in the respective Democratic and Republican national conventions to find out who was going to be nominated for president.

The marathons of 1928 may be long gone, but as recently as 1972, George McGovern won a contested Democratic nomination in procedural fights over the seating of pro-McGovern delegate slates from Chicago and from California, whose winner-take-all primary the South Dakota senator had won by a slim 5 percent.

But that last-minute battle -- with the Rev. Jesse Jackson successfully leading an insurgent McGovern slate from the Windy City -- left the nominee little time to choose a running mate. When his last-minute choice, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, turned out to have undergone electroshock therapy for depression and alcoholism, the McGovern campaign crashed and burned.

The parties learned that lesson well. Front-loaded caucuses and primaries now decide each party's nominee by May or June, leaving the late-summer national conventions as little more than carefully managed coronation ceremonies.

The last remaining convention drama had been the choice of a running mate. But late Friday, Barack Obama turned this week's four-day Democratic function into little more than a televised campaign rally by announcing his choice of a running mate well in advance of the opening gavel.

His choice -- Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden -- was deemed to have campaigned well in this year's primaries, even winning several of the debates, though he garnered few votes.

The choice is widely seen as an attempt to bolster first-term Sen. Obama's bona fides by adding an older, stable presence with highly esteemed expertise, particularly in foreign affairs.

Sen. Biden also has the advantage of having been thoroughly "vetted" in a decade of national campaigns. True, in 1987 he admitted to plagiarizing a campaign speech of Labor leader Neil Kinnock of Britain. It also turned out he'd received an "F" in a law school class after being caught plagiarizing a law review article, and that he had falsely claimed to have graduated in the "top half" of his class (he actually graduated 76th in a class of 85). But after 21 years, those problems are largely seen as old news -- water under the bridge.

Like Sen. Obama, Sen. Biden is a lawyer. He has been in the Senate for six full terms -- longer than John McCain -- and serves as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Biden managed to shoot down the nomination of conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, but proved unable to block the appointment of Clarence Thomas in 1991. In 1994 he authored the landmark Violence Against Women Act, portions of which were ruled unconstitutional in 2000.

Combining lifetime vote ratings for 104 senators including several who have left the Senate since 2007, as compiled by both Americans for Democratic Action and the American Conservative Union, the Web site Daily Kos ranks Joe Biden in a tie with Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as the body's 40th most liberal senator with a rating of 81.2, compared to Barack Obama's fifth-most-liberal rating of 95.3.

Vice presidents are important because they can ascend to the presidency. Dick Cheney has certainly played a more significant role in the office than most of his predecessors.

But the old notions that a running mate must be chosen from far across the country to add "geographic balance" (Henry Cabot Lodge, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Miller, Spiro Agnew) -- or even that they can carry their home states for the ticket -- have largely gone by the boards.

In fact, choosing a running mate is today considered one of those decisions where the best a nominee can expect is to "do no harm."

Second-place finisher Hillary Clinton would have been a more dramatic Democratic choice this year, offering voters an historic opportunity to elect both the first black and the first woman to these high offices. But Sen. Clinton carries strong negatives -- trailing back to her failed secret committee to nationalize health care, and including most notably her husband, a former president who shows no signs of curbing his philandering, thus posing to any Obama administration the unanswerable quandary, "What do we do with Bill?"

Sen. Obama appears to have chosen safely. Whether he has chosen well, we will know in 11 weeks.