JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Everything about Joe Biden says weakness in Barack Obama.

They say that Biden, being Catholic, will help Obama with Catholics. That is to say that Obama, in his own right, needs help with Catholics.

They say that Biden, hailing from Scranton, Pa., before settling in nearby in Delaware, will help Obama in his vital native state. That is to say that Obama, in his own right, needs help in a blue state that even John Kerry won.

They say that Biden, a scrapper from the working class, will help Obama with white blue-collar voters. That is to say that Obama, in his own right, got creamed in his party's primaries among these vital voters -- from Pennsylvania down through West Virginia into Ohio and on to Kentucky -- by Hillary Clinton.

They say that Biden, a four-decades member of the U.S. Senate, will help Obama by lending experience. That is to say that Obama, in his own right, lacks experience. Biden's selection invokes a contradiction: Obama presumes to offer a new kind of politics, yet his first real decision embraces the very oldest politics.

They say that Biden, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee with insights and connections around the world, will help Obama with international credentials. That is to say that Obama, in his own right, lacks international credentials.

They say that Biden will lend Obama many of the same benefits that Hillary would have provided as the running mate. That is to say that Obama didn't pick her. It is to send a message to Hillary's fervent female constituency that Obama didn't even consider her and that he saw no reason to explain why.

We know why he didn't. One reason is that he doesn't much care for her and didn't want to be overpowered by her. He couldn't have said that. The other is that Bill's baggage would have been too much to endure. Obama surely could have said something about that, in a delicate way.

He could have explained that ethical considerations were simply and unavoidably too complex, with a former president maintaining a presidential foundation drawing international contributions and undertaking international initiatives while being the spouse of the vice president.

They say that Biden is a great campaigner. So let's recall that he has a history of verbal over-indulgence and once referred to Obama as a "clean" black man. Let's recall that he once got caught plagiarizing a British politician, expropriating the Brit's biography and poetic invoking of it.

So let's check to see how many delegates Biden won as a Democratic presidential candidate this year. It appears approximately to be -- well, let's round up. To zero.

Balancing a ticket used to refer to geography and specific electoral leverage. Making a selection out of personal weakness is quite another.

Biden offers no specific electoral enhancement to Obama. He merely shores up his tiny Democratic adoptive home state and perhaps solidifies his much larger native Democratic state.

Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Jim Webb -- any might have delivered a red commonwealth to blue, meaning Virginia. But that would have worked only if Obama was holding up on his own elsewhere, in which case he could have made a running mate selection from his own strength, not to cover his own weakness and import assets.

Absent that electoral advantage in some key locale, running mates end up meaning nothing by November. By then voters will obsess appropriately on the two men presuming actually to become president.

The first George Bush got elected even with a vapid golfer as his running mate. That same year, Michael Dukakis had a potent running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, who was supposed to mitigate Dukakis' weaknesses, like Biden for Obama. Dukakis got creamed, especially in Bentsen's Texas.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.