ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Now it can be told: Joe Biden is Obama’s running mate. MUST CREDIT ATTACKERMAN! I slept through my text message after dashing to my BlackBerry every time it chirped with the 10 Twitters from friends all informing me that they were going to the place we were all going. Ezra is on cloud nine, Mike Tomasky is tepid ("A good choice? Sure. At least, not a bad one"), Egregious calls it "an arranged marriage" and my Obama-disliking father emails to say, "That’s one piece of his soul that won’t be back" as if I’m supposed to know why that is.

Like practically every journalist in Washington, I’ve interviewed Biden more than once, and have the same mixed feelings. Unlike practically every journalist in Washington, I have the greatest Joe Biden story of all time. Unfortunately, it really has to be acted out in order for the full impact to take hold. If you see me in Denver, or otherwise, don’t let me leave until I’ve told my Biden story. It’s worth it, I promise.

Attitudinally, as Ezra points out, Biden has a style I like a lot: he treats a ridiculous argument, like an endless occupation of Iraq or a cynical manipulation of 9/11, as worthy only of ridicule. Liberals don’t do ridicule nearly as often as we should, and Biden is the master of it. There was once a blog — like 2004 or 2005 — titled Joe Biden Is Thugged Out.

But Biden, of course, voted for the war. He repudiated the war earlier than practically any other Washington wise man, on Meet The Press in November 2005, but he did so in a very incompetence-dodgy way:

"It was a mistake. It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly. … I–with this president, absolutely I would vote no, based on the way in which they’ve handled it."

The Iraq plan he’s put forward really depends on the emphasis you put on each part of it, but it’s between a partition of Iraq and a very robust federalism. Ironically, the Iraqi parliament was united in rejecting it. As far as I know, Biden hasn’t been pushing it so much after the Iraqis balked, but it does have the merits of privileging the idea that each community has to receive an equitable and, crucially, balanced yield of resources. It also emphasizes the idea that the U.S. needs to actively broker an Iraqi political settlement instead of providing an open-ended security commitment. Still, we shouldn’t be telling other countries — and especially countries we occupy — that they have to radically transform their conception of themselves in a fundamental, existential way.

Something else that struck me from our interviews. Biden is many things, but he’s absolutely not intellectually insecure. I’ve seen his key staffers argue with him on important, substantive points of policy — war policy, even — while I was in the room, notebook out, voice recorder on. Once Biden agreed to an interview about the war after coming back from an eleven-hour flight from Libya, and was disturbingly sharp, and so was his key foreign-policy aide, Tony Blinken. A lot of politicians keep yes-men around. Biden keeps intellectual counterweights around, both his staff and the press, to keep himself sharp. Whatever his faults, he’ll be ready to govern from the start.