MSNBC went live shortly before 1 AM EDT, with David Shuster anchoring, to announce that Senator Joe Biden is Barack Obama's pick for Vice President, and Shuster was joined via phone over the next hour by NBC News political director Chuck Todd, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. One word I didn't hear in that hour or the next as MSNBC remained live until 3 AM (CNN and FNC went to re-runs at 2 AM): liberal. In MSNBC's 2 AM hour, Joan Walsh of Salon.com touted Biden as a “working class hero.”
Olbermann hailed the “very powerful combination” of Obama and Biden based on joining Obama's “vision” of restoring America's image in the world and Biden's selfless “fervor to do good” enabled by his “18,000 good ideas” to achieve Obama's noble goal.
At about 1:35 AM EDT Friday night/Saturday morning, Olbermann proposed:
The international experience comes from a fervor to do good and to come to a consensus and present America's best foot forward. I can't imagine that there's any, that there's any wedge on this subject that can be driven between these two men because the one is saying “I have a vision of what I want to have America look like internationally” and how he can restore the envy that we used to have, the positive envy we used to have. And the other man is saying, “listen, you want to do that, I've got 18,000 good ideas. Here's where they might fit in and you're welcome to all of them. All I want to do is see it happen.” That's a very powerful combination. If you've got a Vice President who looks like he can do something and doesn't want anything more than to see it done, that seems to be a pretty good starting point.
