Joe Biden comes across as a ball and chain in 2012 election, but President Obama won't dump him from the ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton

If this were the real world, which presidential politics sure are not these days in a campaign that feels like mud-wrestling, Joe Biden would be fired for

what he said the other day about chains. Biden would be gone and Barack Obama would be doing something he should have done a year ago, at least, which means

ask Hillary Clinton to run with him.

“It’s a little bit of a dream,” a big Democrat told me on Monday, talking about Hillary, before Biden opened his big mouth again and made you wonder how

he got this close to the presidency in the first place. “A little bit of a dream, but for what would be a dream ticket.”

You can come up with a hundred reasons why it will never happen, starting with the fact that Obama, who never wants you to see him sweat, would never allow

himself to look like he needs to bring Hillary out of the bullpen. A better reason, of course, is that as tremendous a secretary of state as Hillary Clinton

has been for him, Obama doesn’t like the Clintons any more than the Clintons really like him.

Sometimes you get the idea that the President likes having Hillary Clinton traveling the world the way she does so nobody spends too much time looking for an

answer to the great unknowable question from 2008:

How much better off might we all be if Hillary Clinton had won?

Maybe all the experts will be right about the candidates for vice president in the end, and they won’t matter, not Paul Ryan and not Biden, who heads to the

finish line of his first term looking like he’s in a sack race. And by the way, nobody cares what he meant to say the other day, whether he meant to talk

about shackles rather than chains.

What matters is what the vice president of the United States did say to a predominantly black audience in Danville, Va.: “They’re going to put y’all back

in chains.”

That was the big money quote from Biden, who doesn’t back up or apologize for what he said originally. “I know I am sometimes criticized for saying exactly

what I mean,” Biden said in Blacksburg, Va., on Wednesday. “It’s not going to change.”

That is only good news for the people running against him. You know all those pictures we see these days of Paul Ryan, fitness buff, running? The guy will

run faster getting to a debate with Biden than the anchor leg of the 4x100 relay in the Olympics.

This doesn’t make Biden some enemy of the state, or as dangerous as Dick Cheney once was. But Biden continues to live one of the great charmed lives any

vice president has ever lived.