CHICAGO, Saturday (AFP) - Barack Obama today named veteran Senate colleague Joseph Biden as his vice presidential running mate, adding foreign policy heft -- but also a loose tongue -- to his ticket for November's election.
The 47-year-old Democratic White House hopeful announced the news in an early-hours email and text message sent out to millions of signed-up supporters. “I've chosen Joe Biden to be my running mate,” Obama said in the email.
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| US Senator Joseph Biden: Obama’s VP candidadate |
“I'm excited about hitting the campaign trail with Joe, but the two of us can't do this alone. We need your help to keep building this movement for change.”
The official campaign website had already been adapted to read “Obama-Biden” and it invited supporters to send a welcome note to the Delaware senator, 65.
The news came after a furious day of intrigue on Friday just two days before the Democratic nominating convention starts in Denver to herald the official start of the election campaign between Obama and Republican John McCain.
The McCain campaign jumped on past statements from Biden attacking Obama. “There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama's lack of experience than Joe Biden,” McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said in a statement. “Biden has denounced Barack Obama's poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing -- that Barack Obama is not ready to be president,” he said.
Biden's words from a year ago, when he was still in the race himself for the Democratic White House nomination, threaten to haunt him now.
Ahead of a debate among the contenders he had said Obama “can be ready, but right now I don't believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”
At the debate in Iowa, he said: “I think I stand by the statement.”
Biden, who is loquacious and pugnacious, would fit that bill. A Catholic native of Pennsylvania, he would also bring appeal to the kind of working-class voters with whom Obama has struggled to connect.
Above all, the chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee brings decades of national security experience on board, having first been elected to Congress at the age of 29 in 1972.
On the campaign stump this week, Obama has singled out Biden for praise over his response to the crisis in Georgia and proposals to extend more US economic aid to Afghanistan. |
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