This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 27th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Barack Obama has picked his vice presidential hopeful.

Today, it's Biden time at the Democratic National

Convention. So how does the senior US senator from Delaware stack up on issues

related to civil liberties and the drug war? Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project

on Criminal Justice comments.

This is Obama's first big decision

and hits a doozy. I think it's really a disastrous choice

for vice president this this choice of Joe Biden it's the first real indication of

the change that he has been talking about on the campaign trail.

He's picked somebody a conventional big government Democrat who's been in the Senate for 30 years and has really never seen a federal

program that he didn't like. This guy has been for expanding the federal government

year in and year out and by Obama saying this is the guy I won on my team, this is what I think we can expect from the

Obama administration.

This is the first real indication we have from him as the type of change that he's been talking about and I think what we're going to be seeing

is the standard conventional big government Democrat program.

There was a time in the Democratic Party when opposition to the drug war was at the very least a position

that some people could hold or being so-called soft on the war on drugs was something that some Democrats were often accused of.

Does the choice of Biden who is a long-standing drug warrior, does that basically gut that part of the Democratic Party or was it ever

really there? It was there but there wasn't much there and Joe Biden has been a

drug warrior his throughout his entire career in the Senate. He wanted to create the office of the

...