Joe Biden got lucky Wednesday. He made the first of his guaranteed half dozen off-message remarks of the campaign, going over the top with praise and saying, in his effusive, Joe Biden way, Hillary Clinton would have been a better vice president than he would. Nobody (except a couple of PUMA bloggers) noticed, because there was so much other good Silly Season Stuff happening.
Most of the Old Media were caught up in Lipstick On A Pig, Day Two, trying to decide if Barack Obama had insulted Sarah Palin, and occasionaly noting that John McCain had used the same phrase describing Hillary Clinton's health care plan. Obama decried the Same Old Rove Politics by repeating (at 2:42 into the clip below) the emphasized "Enough!" from his Democratic National Convention stadium acceptance speech, but then concluded the clause with "Enough Is Enough!"...
...and fans of internet memes all know what follows THAT exclamation.
Democrats looking for a surrogate to go on the attack could do worse than Samuel L. Jackson and his NSFW anti-snake rhetoric.
Jackson is also anti-pork -- eating, not spending -- in "Pulp Fiction," memorably noting, "I don't wanna eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense to disregard its own feces." But lipstick on a pig may actually help here in the hog state, provided this independent candidate doesn't split the votes.
Arnold Ziffel guarantees "no pork barrel politics," so that bridge to nowhere, or rather to Hooterville, is a firm "thanks, but no thanks."
Independent candidates (perhaps including Ziffel) will split the vote all over the place, if Ron Paul has his way. He endorsed... well, no one in particular on Wednesday, but rather third parties in general and Not McCain in the specific, making a point of saying that he'd gotten a last minute call from the McCain campaign asking for an endorsement and that he's turned them down. Everyone assumes Paul is really backing Bob Barr, whose running mate this week offered to stand down for Paul. Paul, meanwhile, is coasting to re-election to the house -- on the Republican ticket. He may have to eat lunch alone next year.
Or perhaps dine with Joe Lieberman, whose John McCain endorsement got kicked out of the Senate Democrat's lunch table, but not out of his committee chairmanship. Yet.
As for McCain, he's fighting the election with the running mate he has, not the running mate he wishes he had. Sarah Palin's fifteen minutes are continuing, the question being if they will last until Nov. 4. But an analysis of Gallup polling shows that nearly all of McCain's post-Palin gains are in the South.
In the South, South Carolina Democratic chair Carol Fowler got herself in trouble Wednesday for noting that Palin's giving birth to her son with Down syndrome was an important part of her public persona. And that's something I've heard Palin's pro-life/anti-choice (choose your side, even neutral language is near impossible) supporters say as well. Unfortunately, the phrase Fowler chose was that Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”
She quickly apologized. But Joe Biden, wiping a little saliva off his shoes, may have been grateful.
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