The deal with Patrick Leahy

He endorsed Obama. He's a powerful senator, but from a state that won't, I think, have any impact on the outcome of the primaries. What's interesting to me is, Why? Leahy hasn't, in my memory, done any real work with either of these two candidates and they all have mutually orthogonal committee appointments. Matt notes that Durbin and Kerry have also endorsed Obama, but those endorsements make some sense (Durbin is from Illinois, Kerry serves with Obama on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, etc.) Leahy's seems to be coming out of nowhere. David Corn reports that Leahy is saying that his endorsement is a function of optics--Obama, the man and the speaker, would put the best of the three possible faces on the relaunched America (America 5.0?). And I suppose that's reasonable enough, but, this being politics, I have to imagine that there's more to it.