For over a year now, Senator Obama has been America’s poster child for change in politics, driving a message of reform in both his rhetoric and his policies, while resisting attempts by other candidates—namely Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, and before them Senator Edwards—to adopt the image as their own.

Even though reports of Mr. Obama’s Vice Presidential choice, Senator Biden, might have come without surprise for many Democratic faithfuls, they may have been a shock to some of the more sincere Obama supporters looking for a new breed of candidate. Resonating with these voters before the decision was finalized, the New York Times admitted Mr. Biden’s selection would be more of a calculation for balancing Mr. Obama’s ticket with foreign policy experience than a transformative choice. The criticism of Mr. Biden as an unremarkable senator is largely warranted. It stems from a mostly liberal, partisan voting record, and several major career slip-ups—ardent and continuing support for the PATRIOT Act and a later regretted votes for No Child Left Behind and military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I would maintain that the main problem with Mr. Biden, as a Vice Presidential candidate, is something else: he is a six term senator, to Mr. McCain’s four, who like Mr. McCain, has a history of primarily mediocre voting with the occasional willingness to support legislation not traditionally backed by his respective party. Mr. Obama’s selection of Biden is an acknowledgement that Mr. McCain’s experience is necessary to be president and acts as an endorsement of the political path McCain has chosen, which means Mr. Obama can no longer credibly charge Mr. McCain with representing the establishment; Biden is too the establishment.

Even the foreign policy experience, which Mr. Obama is said to have primarily picked Biden for, is flawed. Perhaps in tribute to President Bush, Mr. Biden refuses to concede that his vote for the invasion of Iraq was wrong and has proposed intervention in Iran. As former Senator Gravel put it in the Democratic New Hampshire Debate, Mr. Biden’s foreign policy career has been marked by “a certain arrogance,” which may not be much different from the elitism of which Mr. Obama has been accused; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

It could be months before the entirety of this blunder is realized. But it will. If Mr. Obama’s lead continues to erode and he loses the 2008 election, it will have been his thoroughly undistinguished vice-presidential pick that did him in. The race will be close indeed.

-David LambDigg!