Confident in His Charm?

A new Gallup poll shows that the selection of Joe Biden isn't having much of an impact on the Obama campaign's popularity. 14% of voters say the selection of "Slow Joe" makes them more likely to support the ticket; 7% say they're less likely; for 72%, it makes no difference.

Most of the time, of course, veep nominations have less upside than downside potential. But it's worth wondering whether the response would have been so anemic to the selection of Hillary Clinton.

What's more, although the Biden pick was aimed at remediating Barack's weaknesses with regular voters, it also spoke volumes about the candidate's confidence in himself and his own charm when it comes to winning back Hillary's supporters. Apparently, he feels that his base (and hers) has nowhere else to go, and he's willing to gamble that Hillary's appeal was more demographic (or ideological) than personal.

He could be right; I guess we'll see.