NYC Letter: Unleash Joe Biden!

Countdown 4 days to go

Where is Joe Biden? We believe Joe Biden can make a singular difference in this election. We'd like to hear more from the "experienced" half of the Demo ticket. [Pause.] No. Honest, we would.

(Background posts here, here, here, here, and here.)

HIDIN' BIDEN: REINING IN A VOLUBLE NO. 2

CHARLESTON, West Virginia October 29, 2008 (Time) - Anyone who has watched Joe Biden over 35 years in the Senate might have a little bit of trouble recognizing the guy who is running to be Barack Obama's Vice President. Oh, yes, he looks like the same fellow. But traveling with Biden during this campaign has sometimes been like reporting on a politician packaged in shrink-wrap. While his windy, off-point pontification was the stuff of legend among his Senate colleagues, Biden is now leashed to a teleprompter even when he is talking in a high school gym that is three-quarters empty. The exposure hound who in recent years appeared more often than any other guest on the Sunday talk shows is a virtual stranger to the small band of reporters on his plane — less accessible than even Sarah Palin is to her traveling pack of bloodhounds.

... The campaign's caution is understandable. With Obama leading in all the national polls, only a few things would seem to have the potential to throw him off course.

One of those things is his running mate.

... In the two days that I was aboard his Boeing 737 campaign plane, Biden ventured only a few steps outside his cabin at the front of the plane, which kept him safely away from the reporters at the back. When Biden suddenly appeared at the door to the main cabin, Dallas Morning News reporter Todd Gillman attempted to take a snapshot — a not-uncommon occurrence aboard a campaign plane — and was told by a campaign staffer, "We prefer that you not take photos." According to a blog post by Ryan Corsaro, the CBS News embed on the Biden plane, the candidate has not taken questions from the journalists aboard his plane since Sept. 7, but he has done numerous interviews with local reporters [and this].

... It would have been nice to ask that question of Biden himself, but a campaign spokesman told me the Senator was suffering from a cold that made it a strain to give interviews. (I didn't glean evidence of any symptoms during the four speeches that I watched him give over two days.)

The spokesman also said Biden would consider it "presumptuous" to talk about how he would perform the job for which he is running.

Or maybe it simply wasn't in the script.

And here we are thinking that campaigns are nothing if not a candidate talking "about how he would perform the job for which he is running".

No, vote first, surprises later.