Joe Biden Nearly Got Screwed With His Pants On

"Biden came dangerously close to being replaced with Hillary Clinton

The most shocking news from “Double Down” is that Joe Biden came dangerously close to leaving the Obama ticket. When President Barack Obama’s public opinion ratings dipped in 2011, his aides very seriously considered replacing the vice president with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign went as far as polling focus groups for their thoughts on the switch.

Ultimately, however, research found that Obama’s chances were more or less the same with Biden or Clinton as a running mate, and Biden stayed aboard.

"When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds," the book reads. "Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret."

I would be skeptical - in fact, I would go further and actually call "bullshit!" on the unqualified suggestion made above that the Chicago Brain Trust "very seriously considered" this at any point; in an election year, especially in a tight election year (and there can be no denying this last election WAS tight, even before the covert actions began coming into play), you get polling data on EVERYTHING - for several reasons.

For one thing, it is essentially zero cost and great additional benefit to add one or two additional questions, just to clarify whether or not perhaps the response you receive actually mean what you think they mean, and you are just projecting your own wish fulfillment onto the data to make it agree with what you want it to show. Otherwise you just have a 200 page, $40,000 reach around.

For one or two further pertinent morsels, let's revisit one of our most reliable truisms - life in general, and politics in particular is always more comprehensible whenever it imitates The West Wing.

All of these things have occurred in The West Wing at various point, and unsurprisingly so, as they are from life - these are the realities of political opinion polling; it's a good idea to sprinkle in a few ringers and wildcard questions into the survey at random for not just necessarily the information the responses will provide, but also to conceal what it really is that you are really interested in finding out - because in a sample of several thousand data sets, it's not at all unlikely that one of the respondees in the sample may happen to be a professional journalist, selected at random by computer to supply the answer to the ringer/placeholder question 

"And how would you expect your feeling about him to change, if, in fact, you were to learn that he really was a HIV+ Kenyan Marxist after all...?"

Plausible deniability.