As this campaign comes to a close, I direct you to an amusing piece on the Democratic nominee for veep in TIME Magazine: "Hidin' Biden." The article reveals that Joe Biden has become even less accessible to the press than Sarah Palin, with the Obama handlers counting the days and doing their best to sit on the gaffe-prone Senator until the clock runs out.

You will remember my utter disbelief when Obama tapped "Joe the Biden" as his number two.

Back then, in a post entitled "Biden? Really?" I wrote:

Why haven't we seen more Joe Biden dust-ups over the years? For the simple reason that no one really pays him much attention. Not so anymore. From now until 4 November, the world will be following him around and scrutinizing his every word. Not good for Camp Obama. Sure, the mainstream PrObama press will give him a pass whenever possible, but the conservative media will push and press every chance they get. My guess is that Biden will give them plenty of chances. These guys are likely to be putting out fires almost continually.

While events have proven the foundation of my assertion essentially correct, you will notice that none of his thoroughly predicted mischief made an impact on the election. None of it mattered. Why?

Simple: the fix was in.

When I predicted that his "penchant for injudicious statements" would prove embarrassing to Barack Obama, I had not gotten my mind around the fact that the prObama press corps was determined to shout down and/or not cover anything detrimental to their candidate.

As for Biden and the press and the future, we will see what the next eight years brings. My sense is that Biden cannot be contained or ignored for that long of a period. My suspicion is that we will get a lot of laughs out of Joe the Biden in the years to come.

One More Thing in that vein: once the election is over, and the need to cover for Biden recedes, we may well have another Alexander Throttlebottom on our hands.