Kudos to the Barack Obama campaign for creating a lot of buzz around the selection of Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential candidate. The fact that a secret with that many people involved managed to avoid leakage until about five hours before a mass text message is impressive, probably helped by the presence of a number of red herrings planted to throw off the scent. In the end, we got Obama-Biden and an anticlimactic end to an interesting bit of political tech.
Welcome back, Joe Biden. Love, The Onion.
I had plans, man. I was less interested in the Who than the Effect. I planned to drop everything I was doing the moment I saw the first tweet confirming the selection—and face it, Twitter was going to beat my cell phone to the punch, guaranteed—and then watch the explosion of Obama references emerge on Twitscoop. Perhaps even with a screen cast.
TwitScoop tracks Obama-Biden
My guess was, being a savvy political unit trying to be inclusive of all Americans (including Hawaii), the Obama camp would decide the optimal time for the text message would be 3p Eastern, when all of America is awake. Apparently the future President got that mental memo, but interpreted it in military time.
3:47am? I’m not even up that late when I’m not sleeping. West Coasters only had to have a late night at the bars. Eastern Time Zone residents didn’t have a chance of the shared experience.
Had I been up, I would have seen Biden’s name on CNN (I got my email alert at 12:50a) and on Twitter. One of the people I follow is a regional politico, Paul Roales, who has been tracking this VP watch for a long time. Much of the commentary by him and others had pointed to Indiana senator Evan Bayh. While this proved incorrect, Roales wasn’t alone in this thinking, or in the speculating while I slept.
Here is a reverse chronology of tweets from my information stream (the highlighted are was the first mention of The Text):
Twitter was marked by speculation while waiting for The Text
The choice, ultimately, couldn’t be Evan Bayh because the bumper stickers might send the wrong message (as in, “Obama? Bye.”) But does anyone else remember the same Joe Biden I do? Or is this a different one?