OBAMA PICKS BIDEN: So Much for Change? That’s unfair. He’s at least as fresh a face as Madeleine Albright.

Plus, an epic text message failure? Micah Sifry: “From a tech point of view, the mass txt message seems to have failed.” On the other hand, while people who signed up may not have gotten their text messages, Obama got their names for his mailing list.

UPDATE: Not winning over Katie Granju: “‘I’m not excited by Obama’s choice of Biden. He’s got a long record of aggressively supporting the consumer debt machines that have created so much of the subprime lending mess we find ourselves in today.And in a campaign that has succeeded in large part on the idea of change and progress, he’s simply a throwback.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Miniter: “Biden is almost a ‘neocon’ in his foreign policy views. He voted for the Iraq War in 2002. . . . Does his elevation by Obama signal that that the Obama campaign is backing away from its timetable to withdraw from Iraq? Does Biden’s position differ significantly from McCain’s? Isn’t he, in fact, closer to McCain’s view on Iraq than Obama is?”

Meanwhile, since it’s bound to come up, here my defense of Biden over the plagiarism thing, from The Appearance of Impropriety.

MORE: The Senator from MBNA? “Barack Obama’s choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate is likely to bring up lots of old stories about the long-time senator from Delaware. In 1998, someone called me to talk about the sale of Biden’s house, which had been a minor issue in his re-election campaign two years earlier. But when I traveled to Delaware, I found there was more to it than met the eye, and it was just part of Biden’s close, intertwined relationship with MBNA, the giant credit-card company based in his home state.” The lousy bankruptcy “reform” bill, which MBNA and many of its “friends” pushed hard, was very unpopular on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. I wonder how the leftosphere will respond on this issue now? On the other hand, I don’t think McCain was any better.