Analysis: VP nominee leads the attack
DENVER -- Barack Obama portrays himself as a new kind of presidential candidate, but Joe Biden is likely to spend this campaign as the most traditional of vice presidential nominees: leading the attack against the opposition.
He started that job with a speech to the Democratic convention Wednesday night that was both conversational and feisty.
"The choice in this election is clear," Biden said, making an unmistakable reference to Republican John McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam POW. "These times require more than a good soldier. They require a wise leader."
Biden told of his middle-class roots, praised Obama's judgment and blasted McCain as being inextricably linked to President Bush's policies. That sort of attack is something critics say Obama has been slow to press.
"Part of his portfolio is to be the attack dog," says Ron Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has heard "grumbling" the convention has spent too much time introducing Obama in a positive way and too little defining McCain in a negative one.
Biden capped an evening of speakers, including former president Bill Clinton and 2004 nominee John Kerry, who argued that McCain had lost his standing as a maverick and was offering in effect a third Bush term. "That's not change, that's more of the same," Biden said.
Though he called McCain "my friend" — the two have served together in the Senate for 21 years — he gave him no quarter. At one point, Biden referred to McCain as "George" (as in Bush) before catching himself. "Freudian slip," he said to laughter.
"The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole, with very few friends to help us climb out," Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said.
On talking to Iran, sending more troops to Afghanistan and drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq, Biden said in a refrain he repeated: "John McCain was wrong. Barack Obama was right."
Earlier, Biden had visited the hall before the delegates arrived. Dressed in shirtsleeves, looking relaxed, Biden walked from one end of the stage to the other and then stood at the lectern for a moment, eyeing the teleprompters and looking into the tiers of empty seats.
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