Underwhelming, conventional, even boring – perhaps, at best, pragmatic.

That seems to be the growing consensus among many liberal bloggers who have been weighing in since last night on Senator Barack Obama’s decision to tap Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware to be his running mate.

“I am, needless to say, underwhelmed by the choice of Joe Biden (D-MNBA),†writes Paul Rosenberg on the site OpenLeft. “Sure he’s better than Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine. But that’s an incredibly low bar. Most of what people say he brings does not impress me, and his poor showing in his two presidential outings supports my conclusion.†Read more…

It should come as no surprise to Senator Barack Obama that his vote today in favor of expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is drawing cries of outrage from many corners of the liberal blogosphere. After all, the senator’s own campaign Web site had become a focal point for his supporters to express their displeasure with Mr. Obama’s stance on the bill.

That was the case again today. Carl from Ft. Worth, Texas, posted a message on Mr. Obama’s Web site this afternoon. The subject line read: “Obama just lost my vote.†He continued:

Other comments struck much the same theme. Patrick in Chicago wrote “Can I get my money back this candidate appears to be defective†and Christopher from San Francisco put it simply “Senator Obama, you fail.â€

Ouch.

(Recall that Mr. Obama tried to calm his critics last week with a statement on his site emphasizing that his position on the surveillance plan, “…was not an easy call.”)
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Seems like everyone had something to say about President Bush’s comment to the Israeli Knesset today, when he seemed to imply that an Obama presidency would be akin to appeasement of terrorists.

Among among all the reactions, Senator Joseph Biden, former presidential candidate, offered quite a few colorful words that stood out among the jammed inboxes.

Mr. Biden’s initial reaction, when a group of journalists approached him on Capitol Hill today, was to, well, swear. Mr. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the president’s statement “bull-expletive,” then “malarkey.”

Dick Durbin, the Senate Whip and big Obama supporter, brought back another retro adjective, telling Politico it’s “baloney” that the White House is claiming President Bush’s comment wasn’t a hit on Mr. Obama.

Later on a conference call with reporters, Mr. Biden said he should have just stuck with malarkey as his descriptor, not the cuss word, but he still was visibly peeved with the president’s “outrageous” statement.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton pressed on with her presidential campaign Wednesday, the day after squeaking out a win in the Indiana primary and losing badly to Barack Obama in North Carolina.

As Mrs. Clinton addressed a crowd in Shepardstown, W.Va., voices on TV and around the Internet debated whether it’s in the Democratic party’s best interest for Mrs. Clinton to stay in the race when her chances of grabbing enough delegates to clinch the nomination are shrinking by the day.

The top pundit calling for Senator Clinton to wave the white flag was NBC’s Tim Russert, who said of Mr. Obama, “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it.” His remarks on primary night have been flying around the Internet as a YouTube moment.

Blogger Taylor Marsh, an outspoken Clinton supporter, published a vehemently angry post, calling Mr. Russert, among other things, a “loud-mouthed, self-important elitist.”

“Whose place is it to announce we have a nominee when neither candidate has enough delegates?” Ms. Marsh asked. “I’ll tell you who: no one.”

But for the most part, bloggers from the left and right, with varying degrees of sensitivity, also called on Senator Clinton to withdraw.

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Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding Barack Obama and his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but they certainly keep writing about it.

They also say they’re sick of the expression “thrown under the bus,” but they keep using it. And they said it repeatedly today after Senator Obama held a news conference in Winston-Salem, N.C., to reject and denounce Reverend Wright, who made news yesterday when he defended his fiery sermons and dismissed Mr. Obama as just acting like a politician.

Mr. Obama said it was “appalling” that his pastor would seek out the media limelight to make such remarks, which led John Cole at Balloon Juice to write that Mr. Obama “distanced” himself from Mr. Wright “because I refuse to say he threw him under the bus, which is now my least favorite expression in the English language.”

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway thought Senator Obama said exactly what needed to be said to put this issue to rest.
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The major gripe among the blogosphere today: ABC News spent way, way too much time drilling Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama about their stumbles on the campaign trail instead of focusing on policy issues.

Bloggers at the liberal Daily Kos (which has a heavy Obama following) dedicated the most electronic ink against ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the debate moderators.

One of the writers, Hunter, went so far as to say their handling of the debate was “so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths.”

Harsh.

“Congratulations are clearly in order,” he goes on. “ABC had two hours of access to two of the three remaining candidates vying to lead the most powerful nation in the world, and spent the decided majority of that time mining what the press considers the true issues facing the republic. Bittergate; Rev. Wright; Bosnia; American flag lapel pins.”

“I’m a bit stunned,” writes Joe Sudbay of AmericaBlog. “The questions were literally right out of right wing talk radio.”

And right now you can read (um, if you have a few days) some 14,000 comments posted to the ABC News online story about the debate. Very few are polite.

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Over in Oregon, there’s been a big push among conservatives to switch their individual party affiliations to Democrat ahead of the state’s May 20 primaries, which are open only to declared party members.

John McCain’s got the Republican nod all but locked up, some folks think, and it would help him if his supporters all voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton and thereby elongated the Democratic contest. Other, less strategic, Republicans are voting Democratic with the more pure intentions of choosing which candidate they think would make the best president.

Much of today’s electronic ink is being fueled by a new Associated Press story that talks about how Oregonians are capitalizing on the unusual position of having their Democratic primary be more important than in years past.
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