Get a whole lot of people to sign up with email addresses and cell phone numbers, and viola, you suddenly increased your database of contacts.

Brilliant.  I'm felling better about this after having 2 weeks of McCain getting all the attention while Obama was on vacation.  Crazy like I fox, I guess.

CNN is reporting:

Since declaring the Democratic vice presidential pick would first be announced over e-mail and text message, several hoax announcements of the Illinois senator's choice have circulated, purporting to be from the Obama campaign.

The most recent hoax hit the email boxes of many of the White House Press Corps and declared Tim Kaine the nominee.  Don't get suckered by a hoax.

We could send him a fake text message, and then watch him make a fool of himself.

Whatever we tell him, we have to be reasonably sure that it isn't really it.  Tell him it is Hillary - he would run with that :-).

If anyone could follow this brilliant rollout with an equally brilliant sales job, it's Obama, but I think by minimizing the gap between the announcement and the convention, he's making it awful tough to pick someone who might make even his most ardent and progressive supporters more surprised than pleased.  I've been intrigued by Gov. Schweitzer of MT, but it might take a long time to bring the less close watchers up to speed.  On the other hand, if Obama were to shake the planet by picking Gore, he could wait as long as he'd like.  As it stands, I'm sensing that all the pro-Biden buzz is partially driven by Clinton-phobes.

More good news for Obama - Susan Eisenhower, who represents the old school of bi-partisan adults in foreign policy including Sam Nunn and David Boren, has left the Republican Party to support Obama. I can't think of any two more highly regarded individuals in America than Susan Eisenhower and Carolina Kennedy.

Here's the link.

And in case it's correct, I already put up an Obama/Biden logo here.

...JILL Biden, that is! :)

Though I'm well to his left, I find it hard to dislike Clemons.  I think his Biden-boosting is also partly due to his Clinton-phobia, but I don't think he'd tout the Bidens this way, unless he really saw a lot of merit.  Biden wouldn't have been my first choice (probably not even in my top 10), but I could grow to really like, and more importantly respect, his selection.  For anyone who is wary of Clemons' tolerance of conservative, if Obama does pick Biden, it might make you feel better to know that Clemons really hates the thought of Bayh.

It may be Evan Bayh. Word now is Obama/Bayh bumperstickers are being printed up.

I give up.

Those stickers are quite ugly.

And for any fellow Chet Edwards-phobes out there.  The following from Politico may be a reason why Obama won't pick Chet.

The spokesman for the American Issues Project, the independent group whose ad is the most negative of the cycle and links Obama to terrorism, says the group just filed a report naming its sole donor.

The donor, spokesman Christian Pinkston said, is Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who made his first fortune in chain pharmacies and is now listed as the 73rd richest person in the world, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $2.1 billion.

Simmons, a major Republican donor, gave maximum $2,300 contributions to Senator John McCain last year, as well as to former Governor Mitt Romney and to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

He's listed as a bundler for the McCain campaign on McCain's website, which says he's raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for the Republican candidate.

He's also contributed to Rep. Chet Edwards, the Texas Democrat who has been mentioned as a possible Obama running mate.

Simmons was reportedly a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004.

He's also a backer of a controversial plan to store nuclear waste in West Texas, which his waste management company would administer.

I have nothing against bipartisanship.

they'd make the stickers, Obama-Edwards would be unnecessarily humorous.

1) One of the best things about this rollout is that he gets contacts of likely Obama voters that he can use for GOTV

2) One of the worst things about this rollout is that chum (or "visibility material" aka bumperstickers, buttons, yardsigns, ect) has to be sent out to the field offices later than usual because they want to have the VP's name on them as well. This isn't so bad because Obama has a massive field operation that will be more efficient at distributing material once each office gets it.

3) The "McCain Is Too Rich To Understand Americans" theme is something that the campaign needs to hammer home from now until November. If we pick up a couple more themes along the way that will augment the message then that's great, but McCain's comments are pure gold for us and can be driven home every day for the next 9 weeks.

Thanks.

The best thing has been watching the media fall all over themselves the past few days because nobody would tell them anything.  Although by now, I have a feeling they know but it's embargoed until later.

if it's between Biden and Clinton, I think Biden's the smarter pick.  Time Magazine has already reported that McCain has picked Romney, although McCain's camp denies this.  If Obama picks Biden, it makes it even that much harder for McCain to pick Romney, because Romney's wealth contrasts so dramatically with Biden's relative lack of wealth, especially in the wake of McCain's house gaffe.  Picking Biden would also create no added incentive for McCain to go left and pick Tom Ridge; whereas, if Obama picked Clinton, agitating the many Clinton-phobes in the GOP, it would create the space for McCain to go with Ridge and make a play for the middle where the election is probably going to be won.  I think if Obama picks Biden, McCain will probably pick Pawlenty.  Picking the relatively unknown MN governor with little foreign policy experience will undercut McCain's only arguable advantages over Obama, his greater familiarity with the great number of apolitical people in the electorate and his military/foreign policy experience.  I agree with Obama's number one criterion expressed this morning on CBS, the VP should be qualified to be Vice President, and Biden would crush Pawlenty on this score.  To be fair, Clinton would crush Pawlenty, too, but she could walk on water, and the Clinton-phobes would still hate her.

Of course, I meant to say "the VP should be qualified to be President."

unless, again, it's a problem with Bill's foundation/fundraising since his exit from the Presidency.

For instance, Pew has just released a poll showing party ID to be a 51-38 trouncing for Dems.

Just unify the base, and it's a blowout win.

I think Obama, with Clinton's help, has gone a long way toward healing whatever rifts were created during the primaries and caucuses.  The number of people in the Dem base who would work against a ticket without Clinton, let alone vote for McCain has to be extremely small.

I would not be upset if Obama picked Clinton, because I still think the number of enthused Dems would offset the number of motivated Clinton-haters.  Moreover, I think it's true, as pointed out by a commenter at Nate's five-thirty-eight site, that overreaching attacks on Clinton would rally even more supporters to her side.

My preference for Biden over Clinton is solely due to distrusting the Clintons, because I think Sen. Clinton might want to be President herself so badly that she'd sabotage Obama even if he picked her as his VP.  Watching her pals Begala and Carville on CNN this afternoon, only heightened my distrust.  Clinton-philes feel free to flame me, but I still partially blame Bill for Gore's not being inaugurated in '01 [I won't ever say Gore "lost" or Bush "won."]

If you look at state by state polling in Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, you can see that fully 1/4 of self-identified Democrats aren't voting for Obama at this point. Up to 15% are actually voting for McCain.

This is also true in other states.

It's not the only way to victory, but I continue to believe that putting Clinton on the ticket is the surest/safest way to win.

But as long as it's not Bayh or a few other folks, I'm cool.

(FYI, if you're interested, I explored this topic in depth about a week or so ago in a diary showing the polling in these states. It's a real and enduring problem at this point. The convention may fix that, may not. It'll be up to the hardcore Clinton partisans to decide that.)

Thanks for the tip about your diary.  I like it.  I'm a big fan of the 50-state strategy and going for as big a victory as possible in order to get the biggest mandate possible to quickly clean up Bush's messes and implement the good policies we so desperately need.

If we accept that a Clinton attempt to wrest the nomination from Obama in Denver is a non-starter, it might be best for Obama to pick Clinton as his running mate, precisely because she's so untrustworthy.  As badly as she may want to be President herself, if she's on the ticket, is there any way at all she could fail to campaign her heart out to ensure Obama wins this November?

She might still hope he's a one-termer, and she could try to evade blame for his failure and run again for the top slot in 2012, but if Obama can't find a way to counter this extremely tricky maneuver, maybe he's not worthy of the hype anyway.

While I still think Biden would be a fine pick and would help Obama sufficiently to win this year, I could be persuaded that Clinton would be a fine pick, too, and maybe, a bit better than Biden, if I could believe that the maxim about keeping one's friends close and one's enemies closer is especially critical in the case of Clinton.

"Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin?  If Obama picks Clinton, something tells me it might see an uptick in sales...

Oliver Stone's JFK.

and the vice presidency wasn't considered to be a substantial job.  Gore and Cheney have for good and evil rewritten the position.

I think the case can be made that after Bush's essential incompetence, the second worst thing about the current Administration was giving as much power as he gave to Cheney.  I bet the next VP will be relegated to the unimportant job it had been before Cheney.  As in the Supreme Court decision that gave the Presidency to Bush in the first place, the Cheney example should be viewed as a one-time thing, not to be used as precedent in any future case.

All this talk about Biden and Clinton might be moot, anyway. Drudge has an image of an Obama Bayh '08 bumper sticker. Which I'm not thrilled about, because Obama has always been a critic of the DLC, and Bayh was a strong supporter of the Iraq War. But there it is, for whatever that's worth.

 

Faux is now reporting that a private plane from Chicago has landed in Delaware, whatever the heck that means.