Photo: Breitbart.com

…and it’s Joe Biden:

‘President Obama has no intention of getting rid of Vice President Biden as his running mate, the White House said Thursday.’

Obviously, the president’s pick is going to get a little less fanfare than Mitt Romney’s pick, but it’s worth reporting so we can put all the endless speculation about Hillary Clinton behind us and maybe focus on an issue or two. The matter is laid to rest. President Obama will not be shaking things up with a surprise running mate change. On to the issues!

The article continues:

‘Republicans are being “ridiculous” and are trying to “distract attention” with their focus on Vice President Biden and his controversial comments earlier this week, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

“They know that what they’re saying about this is ridiculous,” Carney said at a briefing with reporters, adding that it’s an “obvious” attempt to take attention away from policy issues.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign lashed out at Biden and President Obama this week after the vice president in an address in Virginia said the Republican’s approach to the financial industry would “put y’all back in chains.” Biden made the remarks in front of a racially mixed audience. ‘

*facepalm* Or instead of talking about issues, now that we know Joe Biden is Obama’s running mate for sure, the Romney camp might just keep making spurious accusations of race baiting any time the Vice President opens his mouth.

“I see your race card, and raise you another race card.”

Now to be fair to the Obama campaign, this next spurious accusation didn’t come from his campaign like the one noted above, which did come from Romney’s campaign, but an MSNBC host said Thursday that Romney was race baiting when he said that Obama should, “take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.”

The host said: “You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man.” Huh?? Biden can’t say the word “chains” without being a race-baiter and Romney can’t say “anger?”

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, not a veiled, crypto-racist attack.

Both “sides” should take a deep breath and listen to President Obama’s own words in 2009 when he admonished that “we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big, important issues that matter to the American people without vitriol, without name-calling, without the assumption of the worst in other people’s motives.”

Why has the discussion become so bitter, so filled with scurrilous accusations, so focused on and absorbed by total non-stories about each candidate’s words taken totally out of context and twisted beyond any reasonable interpretation just to make a mean accusation about the other side? The typical explanation is that we’re so polarized on the issues, but I think that’s a bit facile.

The reason our conversation has devolved into this is that both of the two biggest party’s candidates for president this election cycle are so indistinguishable from each other on a substantive policy basis. Their supporters can’t have a debate about the issues when the candidates are on the record in word and deed as supporting virtually the same overall approach to public policy that Washington has been following for years now.

If that’s the case (and I offer quite a bit of evidence at the link above), then how can the two camps have a debate? What on earth would they say? Your candidate is wrong on some major, substantive public policy issue that my candidate has virtually the same position on? So to differentiate, they fight tooth and nail over peripheral managerial issues, and, unfortunately, over unfair and ridiculous misrepresentations of “the other” side’s candidates as cynical, raving race-baiters.

The American people deserve better than this. No more celebrity-gossip style speculation about VP picks, no more posturing as diametrically opposed over petty managerial differences in the candidates’ public policy approach, and no more bad-faith accusations of race-baiting. If one of these candidates really does make a genuinely racially charged remark, we won’t need pundits to tell us they did. It will spread through social media channels like wildfire and the American people won’t stand for it.

And finally, congratulations, Mr. Biden, on getting another run at the White House on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket. Whatever differences we may have over issues of pubic policy– I wish we could discuss them instead of your alleged race-baiting.