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Quick: Name the two candidates for vice president that have both been announced within the past 7 days! No fair looking at the newspaper, or checking it out on Google.

With the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson delivering Texas to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the candidate for vice president makes absolutley no difference in how I, or most people will vote in nine weeks. McCain may pick up the hard core feminists just because he has a woman running at his side, but it is a woman that few outside of the National Governor's Association that anyone has ever heard of. I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to current events, but I had never heard of her until last week.

Remember that John Nance Garner, Truman's VP said the position wasn't worth a 'warm bucket of spit."

People do not vote for the vice presidential candidate, they vote for the person (man) at the top of the ticket. Obama supporters are still going to vote for him, even if he had chosen a frog, qualified or not, to run with him. While some may not care for Senator Joe Biden, his hair, or his verbosity, they are not voting for him, or his very handsome family.

Governor Palin was chosen to help Senator McCain shore up some of his perceived weaknesses: Gun control-She's an NRA member and they just always vote as a block; Abortion rights; She is against them, whereas McCainat one time favored them, but pandered to the right wing of his party and now is against abortion rights. And then there is the woman
thing.

If Obama was weak on foreign policy then he picked the right man with the right credentials to shore up those perceived weaknesses. Joe Biden chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He went to Georgia just a couple of weeks ago and I don't mean the one with Atlanta as its capital.

Most Vice Presidents end up being forgotten anyway. If William McKinley hadn't been assassinated, Theodore Roosevelt would have been one line in the back of a government textbook. Have Franklin Roosevelt not died 87 days into his fourth term, Harry Truman would have reurned to his Missouri hometown carry just his hat. There were no pensions back in the day. (After nearly eight years as President, it was Truman who argued for and eventually received a Presidential pension until his death in 1972.)

In nine weeks, I am voting for Barack Obama. I'm a 'yellow dog Democrat,' I would rather vote for a yhellow dog than a Republican. End of discussion.

Learn more about this author, Tom Ontis.
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