Writing on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, thoughts and memories zip by—such as:

If Barack Obama had any sense of humor he would have introduced Joe Biden, his vice presidential choice, as a man both clean and articulate.

How many white guys get an intro like that?

The Biden choice has numerous implications, the most important of which is that the campaign concluded that the “experience” gap in Obama’s resume was potentially fatal to his candidacy. Otherwise he would not have selected a long-time Washington insider with tons of baggage who snuffs out any hint of “change” and adds hardly anything to electoral geographics.

On the plus side—in addition to a ream of foreign policy and national security credentials—Biden is Catholic, which will be a great help, has a heart-wrenching back-story and is solidly working class. OK—so his father once had a fortune, lost it all and the family scuffled for years. Maybe that makes him nouveau pauvre.

He is also a fearless scrapper—another perceived gap in the Obama resume.

And yes, though Biden’s home state of Delaware is solidly Democratic anyway, he is said to be especially popular in eastern Pennsylvania, which means some extra protection in a state Obama can’t afford to lose. He could even be vaguely helpful in Ohio, the most pivotal state in the election.

Biden has been a major sponsor of key progressive legislation in the realms of fighting crime and protecting women, but also voted for what Obama might term some bone-headed legislation as well, such as the recent bankruptcy bill.

To say nothing of having voted for the Iraq war—which makes one question that vaunted foreign policy acumen. Well, he apologized fully and relatively quickly for that error of judgment.

He is given to all kinds of gaffes and suffers from terminal logorrhea, though he showed remarkable discipline during the primary season. But there are still a couple of months to go. Lots of fingers are crossed.

We’ll see reruns of his every miscue of the past two decades—including his channeling of Neil Kinnock, the British Labour candidate—but we’ll also see Obama get some good cover from a seasoned attack dog.

Evan Bayh, blah and conservative, would have delivered Indiana; Kathleen Sibelius would have added gender balance and would have been in many ways Obama’s most personally sympathetic choice, but devoid of international experience; Tim Kaine would have helped carry Virginia and is another ideological twin, but his slate is as blank as Obama’s. Hillary Clinton would have been named only in abject desperation—an admission that the ship was sinking.

So grade the Biden choice a strong B-minus—interesting politically with somewhat of a risk factor.

I expect the convention to run smoothly, unlike Chicago those 40 years ago, which was the last boss-controlled Democratic conclave. Some fools seem to have a weird nostalgia for those days, yearning for the dictatorial wisdom of all the old state and city machines.

As a veteran of the 1968 Chicago fireworks I see a clear if indirect line connecting then and now. The party was split because of a bloody war and the bosses didn’t have the sense to see what lay on the horizon.

Too late did Hubert Humphrey, the bosses’ nominee, come out against the war, but he almost won even then.

In defeat the survivors laid the groundwork for democratizing the nomination process. The Democratic Party suffered many serious defeats in the course of perfecting the process, which made it possible for people such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to emerge out of nowhere to win the presidency. Perhaps that’s why E. M. Forster offered only two cheers for democracy.

But the reforms that grew out of the 1968 disaster are what made Obama’s nomination possible. If the bosses still ran the show, Hillary Clinton would have been the hands-down winner this year.

Who knows but what she might even have picked Biden as a runningmate.

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Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer