Obama's Cheney

After 36 years in the Senate, Joe Biden has been called many things, but an agent of change isn't one of them. Barack Obama was 12 years old when Mr. Biden won his first Senate campaign in 1972, though in this campaign that's a virtue. The advantage the 65-year-old Delaware Senator brings to this Democratic ticket is experience, especially on foreign affairs.

In that sense, Mr. Biden's selection looks like a shrewd choice. The Foreign Relations Committee Chairman fills a gaping hole in Mr. Obama's resume, especially for a fall run against a seasoned national security hand like John McCain. Republicans are already having fun with a TV ad showing that, during the primaries, Mr. Biden had said Mr. Obama isn't ready to be President. That's fair enough, but many voters may think better of the rookie candidate for recognizing his weakness and addressing it.

Joe Biden is no hawk as we understand the term. He is, however, in the liberal foreign policy mainstream, part of the Richard Holbrooke-Dennis Ross wing of the Democratic Party. This means he brings some realism to national security questions, realizing that there are men and nations in the world that wish America harm and that sometimes they have to be confronted.

He voted for the Iraq war in 2002, understanding that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and he waited longer than the other Democratic Presidential candidates to turn against the war. He was wrong about the surge in Iraq, and wrong as well in his repeated claims that "political reconciliation" had to precede security progress. We now know that security was the prerequisite for political progress. But Mr. Biden also recognized the costs of potential U.S. failure in Iraq, and thus he never endorsed a wholesale retreat the way that Mr. Obama did.

In all of this he is a welcome contrast to Anthony Lake, Susan Rice and the other superdoves who populate Mr. Obama's national security councils. Their advice has produced such displays as Mr. Obama's stumbling early response to Russia's aggression in Georgia, when he sounded as if he believed that both sides were equally at fault. As a vice presidential choice, in short, Mr. Biden is not unlike Governor George W. Bush's selection in 2000 of Dick Cheney as a reassuring counselor on national security. If the angry liberal Netroots don't like that analogy, so much the better for the country.

No doubt Mr. Obama is counting on Mr. Biden to take out after Senator McCain, and that should be entertaining, if not an adventure. Mr. Biden is legendary for his loquacity, and his riffs can take, well, curious turns. We were reminded this weekend of his remark, in March 2001, to John Bolton, during his confirmation hearing to be Undersecretary of State for arms control: "My problem with you, over the years, has been you're too competent. I mean, I would rather you be stupid and not very effective. I would have had a better shot over the years." That didn't prevent Mr. Biden, four years later, from leading the nasty assault on Mr. Bolton's nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.

In any number of ways, Mr. Biden does not help Mr. Obama's theme of changing Washington. The biggest false note in Saturday's joint Obama-Biden appearance was when Mr. Obama said that Mr. Biden will help him "turn the page on the ugly partisanship of Washington." Tell that to Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas or Ursula Meese, wife of Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese, whom Mr. Biden drove to tears with one of his ugly Judiciary Committee tirades. Mr. Biden has been in the middle of some of the Beltway's most ferocious partisan warfare.

If Saturday's event and recent campaign ads are a guide, Mr. Obama is shifting his message after his recent fall in the polls. The inspiring if also vague calls for change are giving way to a harder-edged economic populism and attacks on Mr. McCain that Mr. Biden will be called upon to carry out. With that message, Mr. Obama is becoming less an outsider and much more like the Democrats who now run Congress. We'll find out in November how reassuring voters find that message.