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WHITE HOUSE
The Partners
Dick Cheney changed the vice presidency in unprecedented ways. But Joe Biden may be more powerful.

by Michael Hirsh<http://nationaljournal.com/reporters/bio/42>
Monday, October 25, 2010 | 02:50:59 PM
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Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Obama and Vice President Biden in the Oval Office.
You can see it in his face: Joe Biden is happy. It is a warm autumn day in Des Moines, Iowa, the quaint prairie town that has become the epicenter of American political fortunes, and Biden is standing at last where he always dreamed he would be: at the apex of power in the United States. Actually, at this particular moment Biden is standing at the counter of Java Joe's Coffee Shop, asking, "Lenny, you want any coffee?" That would be Leonard Boswell, the local Democratic representative whom the vice president has come to help survive the tide cresting behind the Republicans in the midterm election. With his seven-term career on Capitol Hill on the line, Boswell seems a bit tense, but Biden is relaxed and chatty. His own fortunes are, for once, no longer in doubt in Iowa, where he foundered so often in the past, and on this trip he savors a little of the prodigal son's return.
Soon the two of them head over to a rally at the nearby Hotel Fort Des Moines, where Boswell opens the festivities by telling the luncheon crowd that Biden "has been to Iowa many, many times." Behind him onstage the veep histrionically crosses himself, provoking laughs. When Biden steps up to the mike, he flashes his gleaming white smile and declares, "I've spent more time with you guys out here than I have with people in Delaware."
This is not even remotely true. Biden was elected to the Senate at such a ridiculously young age-29-that he had to calculate whether he would be constitutionally old enough (30) in time to be sworn in, and for decades afterward he would board an Amtrak train at Union Station to return to Wilmington every day. He is still wildly popular in the postage stamp of a state he moved to when he was 11 years old, even as the rest of the country remains somewhat puzzled by what Biden stands for. But it's not surprising to hear Biden casually exaggerating how often he's been to Iowa, and just how many times he's had the tar kicked out of him in presidential runs that started there: the disastrous first campaign in 1988, when he dropped out amid allegations of plagiarism; the embarrassment 20 years later, when he thought he'd earned real contender status after 36 years in the Senate but received a pathetic 1 percent of the caucus vote.
Today Biden can afford to be magnanimous about such past failures. Like Shakespeare's once-"unthought-of" Prince Hal, he can crop all of the honors in his fallen rivals' crests and make a garland of them for himself. Never mind that the Democrats are about to take a licking in the midterms, or that pundits right and left are snarling at the Obama administration for doing too much of that, or too little of this. For Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., this is a golden moment. Indeed, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Biden, a self-described regular guy who has spent most of his political career trying rather desperately to be taken seriously by his peers and the public, is possibly the most powerful vice president in U.S. history.
Until now, Biden's predecessor, Dick Cheney, has been seen as the gold-some might say sulfurous-standard in vice presidential power. Biden himself, ironically, once described Cheney as "probably the most dangerous vice president we've had" (though Biden recently spoke to Cheney after his latest heart surgery and talks to Cheney's daughter Liz quite a bit). Cheney mounted an extraordinary, clandestine effort to expand the executive branch's powers during wartime. The effects of that campaign linger: In a series of striking reversals, the Obama administration has come to accept part of the Bush White House's aggressive approach to the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects and to targeted killings. But in terms of the sheer number of issues that Biden has influenced in a short time, the current vice president is bidding to surpass even Cheney.
Moreover, as Washington confronts the implications of a bitterly divided Congress, with supermajorities soon to be a memory, it is very likely that Biden's role in the next two years of the Obama administration will become even more significant. No one has more experience reaching across the aisle, and that talent may be critical in the coming months to just keeping the government functioning.
"He's going to be the go-to person," says his former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, who has filled Biden's senatorial seat the last two years. "He can sit down in foreign policy or other issues and find a common interest and drive the ideas forward. Look at what he did with Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond [inducing them to support the chemical-weapons treaty and crime bills, respectively, in the '90s]. I mean, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond! You don't get more conservative than that."
One of the biggest nightmare scenarios that could come out of a Republican-controlled Congress is a government shutdown over the budget, which could immediately increase the risk of a double-dip recession. "I think there would be a negotiation before that happened, and that would be Biden's role," Kaufman says. Sen. Judd Gregg, the retiring New Hampshire Republican, agrees. "They'd be very smart to bring him more into a role of managing and dealing with Congress," he says. "They've not done a great job of dealing with Republican members, especially the leadership: Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, and Lamar Alexander. Clearly, all three have great personal relationships with Biden."

INSIDE A PARTNERSHIP
For close observers of Washington it's not easy to accept the idea that Joltin' Joe Biden, one of the more mistake-prone presidential aspirants in recent memory, is now the most influential VP ever. That he is not only a heartbeat away from the presidency but also a half-beat away from every major policy decision coming out of the Obama White House. Or that any veep-Cheney's power grab aside-could ever be very consequential.
The vice presidency is, after all, a two-century-old joke in American political lore. John Adams, the nation's first vice president, bitterly derided his job as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived." Like Adams, it was often men who had tasted real power who had the most disdain for the job. John Nance Garner, a former House speaker and FDR's equally slighted No. 2, declared that the job wasn't "worth a bucket of warm spit" (it's believed that he used an even saltier term). In modern times the vice presidency began to grow in stature, especially as the hair-trigger calculus of the Cold War required presidents to keep their putative replacements informed. But for the most part, the job remained a funeral-attending, snooze-inducing post barren of almost all constitutional duties.
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Photos: (center) Getty/John Moore; (clockwise from top right) AFP/Getty/Mandel Ngan; White House/Pete Souza; Rod Searcey; Chet Susslin; Richard A. Bloom; Richard A. Bloom; AFP/Getty/ Nicholas kKamm; Liz Lynch; AFP/Getty/Saul Loeb
The previous two vice presidents, Cheney and his predecessor, Al Gore, significantly changed that power dynamic. But on Biden's watch, the OVP-Office of the Vice President-has become something even more: almost a conjoined twin to the presidency, organically linked and indivisible from the Oval Office. Cheney succeeded for a time by creating a kind of shadow presidency, yet there's nothing shadowy about Biden. He and Obama, both consummate pragmatists though they tend to be liberal in outlook, have achieved something close to a mind meld across a range of issues, including foreign policy, the economy, and political strategy.
The vice president, in an October 12 interview aboard Air Force Two flying from the campaign stop in Des Moines to another in Chicago, makes clear that Obama is in charge and that he, Biden, has no undue influence. "Barack Obama's brain is bigger than his skull; he doesn't need me to explain things to him," he says.
Nevertheless, Biden can hardly contain his enthusiasm for their partnership, and the phrase "Barack and I ... " falls from his lips naturally, with no hint of diffidence. Biden says that to his surprise, Obama continues to "turn over big chunks" of policy to him to handle, whether it's Iraq, middle-class issues, or overseeing the Recovery Act. At a meeting early in the administration, "all of a sudden, Obama stopped. He said, 'Joe will do Iraq. Joe knows more about Iraq than anyone.... The [Economic] Recovery Act, he just handed it over" to Biden, according to a senior administration official who attended the meetings and would talk about internal discussions only on condition of anonymity. (Biden responded by reeling in three key Republican votes from his old Senate colleagues to help pass the $787 billion stimulus, earning Obama's praise.)
It was Biden, National Journal has learned, who proposed and implemented the recent power-sharing arrangement in Iraq between political kingpins Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and Ayad Allawi, reducing the powers of the prime minister's office so that whoever lost that post wouldn't be too put out, according to two senior administration officials.
And little noted in all the hullaballoo about last year's extended debate over Afghanistan inside the administration-the subject of Bob Woodward's latest book-was that Obama had long ago essentially accepted Biden's minimalist approach to defining "victory." At a critical hearing with Gen. David Petraeus in the spring of 2008, it was Biden who counseled then-Sen. Obama to lower expectations when it came to withdrawal from Iraq-an approach that the veep concedes shaped both of their approaches to the Afghanistan debate. Obama, then a presidential candidate, earned plaudits in the press by telling Petraeus: "When you have finite resources, you've got to define your goals tightly and modestly.... I'm trying to get to an endpoint." Biden said the exact language of Obama's questions was suggested, behind the scenes, by him: "He asked for my advice."
Indeed, for a guy who can't stop talking, it's striking that most of Biden's major moments in the past two years have stayed out of the headlines. On financial reform, it was Biden who prodded an indecisive Obama to embrace, at long last, Paul Volcker's idea of barring banks from risky trading, says Austan Goolsbee, who was recently named to head Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. The VP also tilted the discussion in favor of a bailout of the Big Three automakers, according to Jared Bernstein, Biden's economic adviser, who came over from Obama's campaign team. Biden, who also heads Obama's Middle-Class Task Force, argued that the country couldn't afford to lose more blue-collar communities, Bernstein says. "I think he made a difference in the president's thinking. He understood the importance of the auto companies to their communities and throughout the country." When Obama decided to cancel part of Bush's missile-defense plan, Biden quietly flew to Europe to assuage his old pals, the ministers in the Eastern European capitals, squelching what might have been an ugly eruption of protests.
In the midterm-election campaign, it was Biden who pushed more aggressively than anyone to tout all of these triumphs and to appeal to-even admonish-the Democratic base. When job growth shot up last April-more an aberration than a sign of recovery, as it turned out-Biden needled Obama's top economic advisers, especially Lawrence Summers and the now-departed Christina Romer, for seeking to tamp down enthusiasm; he urged them to take credit instead.

DISCIPLES EVERYWHERE
John Adams was not invited to participate in meetings of George Washington's Cabinet. Biden, in contrast, says he's often "the last guy in the room," no small thing in a town where power is often measured in minutes of presidential face time. Biden handles so many issues that when, say, the national-security team leaves the Oval Office, he is often left alone chatting with Obama because Biden needs to be part of the discussion when the economic team arrives to brief the president. He will often sit down with Obama in the residence before an important National Security Council meeting.
It is the fulfillment of Biden's deepest ambitions. When Obama first asked him what he wanted his portfolio to look like, Biden responded that he didn't want one, he just wanted to affect decision-making. "We actually are really simpatico on all issues. I think that of all the candidates running, he and I were most in sync," Biden says. "So I started off with a real advantage." Says his old Senate colleague Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat: "I think he's got his fingerprints on everything."
Above all, there is Biden's approach to power. In George W. Bush's first term, Cheney mounted what was, in effect, an insurgency to take over policy from within the executive branch, using an aggressive staff of ideologues. That's not Biden's style, but more important, he doesn't need to bother with such skullduggery. His thinking and staff are woven into the DNA of this administration in ways that Cheney never achieved with Bush. Biden's 36 years in the Senate have produced generations of Biden protégés, many of whom now occupy top positions throughout the Obama administration. And they've become more powerful after the West Wing staff exodus of the past few months.
The latest Bidenite to rise is Tom Donilon, whom Obama just named to succeed Gen. James Jones as his national security adviser. Donilon, who began his career as a delegate counter for Jimmy Carter, met Biden when the young senator from Delaware became the first elected official outside Georgia to endorse Carter for president in 1976; Donilon signed on as Biden's Senate aide in the late '80s and "has been my adviser for over 25 years," the vice president says. Biden's national security adviser, Antony Blinken, is a close friend of Donilon's (they take family vacations together).
There's also Pete Rouse, the interim White House chief of staff, who worked closely with Biden in the Senate on many issues, as well as Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, who prepped Obama for his debates. Two senior staffers on the National Security Council, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall and Puneet Talwar, were longtime Biden Senate aides. Ted Kaufman, meanwhile, has taken over the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program from Elizabeth Warren. Then there's the plethora of powerful alliances that Biden has cultivated, including with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who often ends their frequent phone conversations by saying, "Talk to you later, dear."

WORKING INCREMENTALLY
Biden remains, in many respects, the anti-Cheney-the garrulous glad-hander to Cheney's sour sphinx; the sunny champion of diplomatic engagement to Cheney's Hobbesian persona. But in two critical respects, the Delaware Democrat and the Wyoming Republican do resemble each other. Both are confident to the point of cockiness in pushing their views, and both are masters of the Washington insider game. "He knows governance better than anyone else," says Republican former Sen. Chuck Hagel, who advised Obama to pick Biden as his running mate for that reason. "In particular, he understands Congress. He understands how it all fits together. He's got the political piece. He's got the policy piece. There's nobody in his league."
Some would argue that Cheney, by pushing such ideological hobbyhorses as the "unitary executive" concept of a superpowerful presidency and the war in Iraq, did more to change Bush's mind than Biden has done with Obama. "Cheney had an ideological agenda that he kind of forced onto the agenda of the White House," says Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Biden's successor as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and another close ally (he was expected to make Biden his secretary of State had he won the presidency in 2004). "Joe doesn't force anything, and he doesn't have to." Hagel agrees that in some ways Cheney altered policy more. "I always referred to Cheney as the prime minister. I do think from what I saw he essentially ran the government for a time. From what I see, I don't think Joe Biden runs the government. But that said, I think Joe's influence is just as significant as Cheney's was."
Yet both Cheney and his predecessor, Gore, remained somewhat distant from their bosses. Cheney's ascendancy was dramatic, but his star flamed out by the end of the first term, especially after Iraq went sour. Gore strongly affected a small number of issues in the Clinton administration, such as climate-change, intelligence, and Internet policy, but he was out of the loop on many others.
Biden has gotten inside Obama's head in a way that Cheney seemed able to do with Bush only for a time, and which Gore managed only sporadically with Bill Clinton. Indeed, Biden and his top aides all freely admit that they set out trying to be the opposite of Cheney by emphasizing teamwork and transparency. "Things did burn out in the case of Dick Cheney, making the second half of his vice presidency not very effective," Klain says. Biden notes: "Cheney had a lot of axes to grind." Today, he contends, "I can't think of an administration where there has been less policy intrigue."
But in being Cheney's opposite, Biden may suffer from going too far the other way. If Bush's vice president went overboard in his imposition of a certain ideology, Biden and Obama may be hurting themselves with too little ideological clarity. Many on the Right see the president as a left-winger or even a socialist who has presided over a frightening expansion of government, while his own liberal base views him as a sellout to Wall Street and Big Business. In his Inaugural Address, Obama declared that he wanted to move beyond "stale political arguments.... The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." That's Biden's approach, as well.
Yet in their zeal to be pragmatic, Obama and Biden seem to have confused the American public about where they stand on principle. Both seem willing to negotiate almost every issue, and the administration often lacks a clear, crisp message. One telling example: When Iran's "green movement" erupted after the election fraud in Tehran last year, Obama and Biden dithered over whether to support the grassroots rebellion against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government and the Revolutionary Guard. The movement has since been crushed. A more inspiring stance from Washington, including assisting Iranian insurgents with communications links and in other areas, might have helped the protests take hold, as Obama seemed to tacitly acknowledge by speaking more forthrightly about democracy promotion in addressing the United Nations in September.

TWO LEADERSHIP STYLES
Nowhere has the problem of too much pragmatism and not enough ideology hurt the administration more dramatically than on economic philosophy. The public views Obama as irresolute on the economy, and he has failed to articulate an extended, systemic case for the "New Foundation" for America he broached last year. It is an ideological vacuum that has been filled by the message of the tea party movement-that there is too much government. Never mind the historical facts: that Wall Street imploded and the economy plunged into a historic recession arguably because of too little government-too little oversight and regulation-prompting even a free-marketer like President Bush to mount a huge bailout.
Biden, rather desperately, went to Iowa to argue that he and Obama have brought "real change," and he has sought to make the case that the clean-energy element of the Recovery Act is the biggest infrastructural investment since the New Deal. Yet this counteroffensive doesn't seem to be resonating. When asked whether he and his partner, the president, are suffering from an excess of pragmatism, Biden seriously considers the question. He takes pride in being the anti-Cheney, and neither he nor Obama is comfortable talking in terms of moral absolutes. But he agrees that "we'll soon find out" whether his message is getting across.
How long can the Obama-Biden partnership continue? Probably long enough to outlast all of the groundless speculation about a switch of places with Hillary Clinton in 2012. (Obama, in an interview with National Journal, called such reports "completely unfounded.") Joe Biden is joined to Barack Obama in more ways than anyone realizes. Indeed, some administration officials suggest that Obama has surmised that the two of them are apt complements: good cop and bad cop, the McCartney and Lennon of politics. "I think Biden's own personality is something the president has come to see as a huge asset," says one senior Biden aide who agreed to speak in personal terms only on condition of anonymity. "Biden has an almost congenital inability not to say what he thinks, and in particular to question premises and assumptions. That allows the president to stay above the fray and not commit." When Obama embraced the Volcker rule, for example, he hemmed and hawed over making the shift because it was a rebuff to his top economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Summers, but Biden handled the friction.
Yet, just as you don't necessarily want two visionaries at the top of a corporation-with no one actually minding the store-it may be a liability to have two leaders who usually prefer pragmatism to ideology running an administration together. The very quality that prevented Biden from ever really taking off in the presidential sweepstakes may now be dragging the once golden-tongued Obama down. Even now the question must be asked: What does Biden stand for, apart from good policy? He may be making Obama better at governance, but what about leadership?
In the end, Biden's stridency in internal debates will probably help the president better define his policies as he heads into 2012, even as the vice president's pragmatism continues to hold back Obama's efforts at self-definition. But either way, Biden will almost certainly be a big part of the mix. As one senior administration official not in the VP's office puts it: "Invariably, when we're working an issue, if you need to bring a little extra muscle to it, you think of Biden. You think, maybe he can call somebody." Over the next two years, if the polls are any indication, the administration is going to need to muscle up big-time.