Obama-Biden '08

This morning, Barack Obama's campaign woke me up at 5am with a text message saying that Obama had selected Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. I breathed a sigh of relief, fell back asleep, and had a West Wing'esque dream.

In my dream, Obama and Biden announced that they would support gay marriage because they were not afraid of being the truly progressive party. Then I woke up.

Even if Obama-Biden will not come out for gay marriage or other "really liberal things" like abolishing the death penalty, I still think this ticket is a move in the right step for the Democratic Party.

I think for too long we have tried the safe-vanilla candidates. We picked John Kerry because he was not as crazy as Howard Dean, and picked John Edwards because he was then perceived as a more middle of the road Democrat from the South. And I will admit that I 100% had this thinking.

After seeing Obama-Bayh bumper stickers on Drudge last night, I feared we were going to follow down this path again. Although Senator Bayh seems like a great guy and a lot of conservatives did not mind him, he was not what we needed. We needed to stop playing it safe because it never actually works. And I am so tired of losing.

I won't go into all the reasons why I really like Biden right now. However, as this year's convention approaches, I will note that the most memorable speech that I heard at the 2004 convention was not Obama's famous red state/blue state speech, or Kerry's acceptance speech, or even Bill Clinton's speech. It was the speech that Senator Biden gave at College Democrats Caucus at the convention.