There is a false assumption that the candidate for President makes the choice of running mate. The truth is that all the candidate does is to rubber stamp the candidate of his party. Anything else is simple fantasy. From the beginning a Presidential candidate his hamstrung by the requirements of their party and this applies to both parties.
I am NOT a fan of Mr. Obama, and I fully expected the first year of Obama to be what it has been. In my personal opinion I feel him to be too prone to negotiation and not as strong at holding his ground as he should be.
At the same time I look at what a McCain and Palin Administration would have looked like and maybe functioned like. Mr McCain may have done a fine job, but, it became obvious early on that Ms. Palin's personal life was definitely not a Republican model of conservatism. Her repeated verbal utterings also began to paint a picture that was most unflattering and placed doubt in my personal mind when it came to her competency in the case she had to assume the Presidency.
I look at the Obama Administration and those who comprise it. Obama is a grass roots negotiator who was effective in the limited capacity in which he had served over the years. Joe Biden the chosen running mate again had a gift for negotiation and though both men are gifted with this skill, this skill alone does not guarantee an effective administration.
As First Lady Michelle Obama will I believe distinguish herself. She will be more than an ornamental "housewife" who just happens to live in the White House.
Personally I did vote for Obama, not because I felt Obama to be the best, but because I felt him to be the lesser of two evils. McCain was a maybe, but the minute that Sarah Palin was placed on the ticket and played the role of the "indignant soccer Mom" I was honestly very turned off to most things she said. What she did repeatedly was to illustrate how totally unqualified she was for the job.
In truth with regards to the effectiveness the Obama Administration has been the most embattled Presidential Administration since that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR inherited a mess very much like what we have now. The main difference was that in his case everything had been allowed to reach total collapse and he had simply no choice but to "spend the country out of the depression". Personally, I am not in complete agreement with some of the things including "Cash for Clunkers", but the reality is that the President of the United States has far more information than I can ever hope to get as a standard issue U.S. taxpayer and he makes his decisions based on information that I am not privvy to.
One of the largest failures we have ever seen was that of the previous 8-year administration. I personally fault the perevious administration with the economic mess we have now. The wars overseas are small peanuts when played against the economy of the United States and to some degree the world around us. Decisions made on the economy have results that reach other countries and either bolster or crash those economies as well.
The only thing that will tell us if we were right or wrong will be the history we write over the next four and maybe eight years. If the sitting President does everything correctly, major economic improvement for the United States is going to take his entire first term in office. In fact, I see this economic crisis lasting at least 8 years and it would not have mattered who inherited the White House simply based on the time in history.
If I had it to do over again? If the choices were the same I would have to make the same decision. I personally would have rather seen Obama as a Vice President and Hillary Rodham Clinton as the President simply because she is by nature a voracious fighter who will stand up for what she believes and NEVER back down from a fight.