Barack Obiden?

Friday August 22, 2008

It’s 1:40 p.m. and Connecticut Democrats are saying they’ve heard that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden is gonna be Barack Obama’s vice presidential guy. You read it here first, if they’re right.

Now it’s 10:40 p.m. and it’s more likely than ever than Biden’s the guy.
Below is a story that ran in the Connecticut Post on April 29, the day after the annual Democratic fund-raiser, when Biden dined with the state’s Democratic elite, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.

By KEN DIXON
Staff writer
HARTFORD – U.S. Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. told Connecticut Democrats on Monday that the upcoming presidential election may be the most-important for the country – and the world – since World War IIover 60 years ago.The veteran Delaware Democrat told about 1,100 people in the Connecticut Convention Center that the November results will be crucial, but a Democratic president and Congress can help “reshape the world.”
“To state the obvious, the next president of the United States has an awesome, awesome responsibility,” Biden said during the state party’s 60th annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner, which was expected to raise about $300,000. “But also, I would argue the greatest opportunity since any president since Franklin Roosevelt,” the 65-year-old chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said. “An opportunity not only to change the direction of the country, but in a literal sense, aliteral sense, to change the direction of the world.”
Biden, who said he’s undergoing minor surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center Tuesday morning, said the Bush administration has presided over the decline of the economy and the stature of the United States on the world stage.After joking for about eight minutes from the stage about Connecticut’s congressional delegation and praising U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3 and U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Biden quickly turned serious.
“If we don’t get it right in Iraq, our children and our grandchildren will be fighting there a generation from now,” Bidensaid. “If we don’t end -as Chris has been a leader in attempting todo – George Bush’s assault on our civil liberties we will forfeit a piece of our soul.”
The Bush administration “has dug America into a very, very deephole” and after eight years has made the country “less secure and more isolated than it’s been at any time in its history.” Nancy DiNardo of Trumbull, the chairwoman of the Democratic StateCentral Committee, who is an uncommitted super delegate to the national convention in August, said in an interview that the party will come together once the close primary season is concluded.
“I do believe that when the primaries are over, whoever’s picked willwin,” DiNardo said. The $175-a-head dinner attracted fewer party regulars than in the recent past, when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton were the keynote speakers. Party high rollers paid up to $2,500 to sit at Biden’s table; $1,000 to sit with a member of Congress and $750 to dine on roasted chicken with constitutional officers including Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. .