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US politics: No ordinary Joe
By Anna Fifield
Published: July 19 2010 23:24 | Last updated: July 19 2010 23:24
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High five: for Barack Obama, a president given to professorial musing, Joe Biden (left) has proved an effective foil – acting as both interlocutor and devil’s advocate

EDITOR’S CHOICE
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Heard the one about the two brothers? One goes off to sea, the other becomes vice-president. And neither is heard of again.
The joke used to be a favourite of Joe Biden<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b52adb0-713d-11dd-a659-0000779fd18c.html> – when he was a US senator. Now as the 47th vice-president, a heartbeat away from the White House, the notoriously loquacious and straight-talking number two to Barack Obama<http://www.ft.com/indepth/obama-presidency> hopes to be anything but the silent, forgotten man.
Indeed, with the administration on the back foot – whether because of faltering economic recovery<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5151fa04-928b-11df-9142-00144feab49a.html>, lack­lustre job creation<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/27452d90-3808-11df-9e8e-00144feabdc0.html> or contentious healthcare reform<http://www.ft.com/indepth/us-healthcare-reform> – as it heads towards important midterm legislative elections in November, the vice-president has emerged as a crucial member of the Obama team.
Interviews with aides, outside advisers, past and present administration officials, and old friends show a vice-president playing a central role in Mr Obama’s decision-making processes – sometimes acting as interlocutor, sometimes playing devil’s advocate – whose forthright manner counters some of the president’s professorial leanings.
Mr Biden – whose aides say he is “congenitally incapable of yes-speak” – is often the loudest dissenting voice, providing an important perspective during the president’s deliberations on everything from how to tackle the Taliban in Afghanistan to the way economic policies will be received in Middle America. (His views on Afghanistan, or rather opposition to them from some in the military, contributed to the sacking of General Stanley McChrystal<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e7523906-7eef-11df-8398-00144feabdc0.html> as US commander in the country last month.)
THE NUMBER TWO
The vice-president, as well as being first in line for the top job, is president of the Senate – a position that carries a tie-breaker vote, which could have been needed during the health overhaul and was in fact used by Dick Cheney in 2001, when each party held 50 seats. The role has grown in stature, certainly since John Nance Garner, a 1930s incumbent, said it was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”. Today, responsibilities are assigned according to the president’s preferences. Facing challenges at home and abroad, Mr Obama has given Mr Biden some of the trickiest, including Iraq. “No one signs up to do this job to be in charge of national apple pie day,” says Ron Klain, the vice-president’s chief of staff.
Last weekend it was the elder statesmanly vice-president – rather than a White House spokesman or adviser – who was dispatched to headline a television talk show to defend an embattled administration facing economic, legislative and foreign policy troubles, as well as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill<http://www.ft.com/indepth/bp-oil-spill>.
He also plays a key behind-the-scenes role, marshalling his 36 years of upper house experience to round up votes and advise Mr Obama – whose time in the Senate was limited to a four-year term, half of which was spent campaigning for the presidency – on how to deal with Capitol Hill.
The president himself has seen his popularity slump. Nearly six out of 10 voters say they lack faith in Mr Obama to make the right decisions for the country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071205453.html> published this month. A new high of 54 per cent disapproved of his handling of the economy. This is especially alarming for Democrats, who stand to lose seats – and perhaps their majorities – in both the House of Representatives and the Senate come November.
Amid all of this, Mr Biden has emerged as a strong and assured vice-president who, as well as providing the administration with a connection to “ordinary” America, has largely managed to keep his foot out of his mouth contrary to expectations. Mr Biden has been given a handful of key portfolios to focus on, notably Iraq and the Recovery act.
It is quite a turnaround. In 2007, Mr Biden’s mouth landed him in hot water when he referred to Mr Obama<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013100427.html> as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” – a remark for which he later apologised. Mr Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, ended in humiliating withdrawal after he was found to have plagiarised a well-known speech by Neil Kinnock. During the past 18 months, Mr Biden has frequently remarked that the running order on Mr Obama’s presidential ticket was the right one, despite his own attempt on the office for 2008.
However, some see him as little more than a lightning conductor who brings experience to a novice administration. “He is clearly trying to put a happy face on the work of the administration but that’s difficult when their policies are failing,” says Brian Darling, who worked for Mr Biden on the Senate judiciary committee and is now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. “Look at the stimulus – it’s been an abysmal failure but the vice-president was out there last week saying it was working when most independent analysts think it is not.”
Mr Biden’s role – and the trust the president has invested in him – provides an insight into how the administration, sometimes described as Obama-centric, operates. Vice-presidential power had been building since Walter Mondale expanded it under Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, and no one exercised more influence than Mr Biden’s predecessor, Dick Cheney.
But except for Mr Cheney, who practically shared the presidency during George W. Bush’s first term, no one has enjoyed quite the clout and status that Mr Biden has. As one of his aides says: “Cheney created a lot of headroom.”
In taking on some of the administration’s toughest briefs at the same time as acting as Mr Obama’s counsellor, Mr Biden is following what some have called “the Mondale rule”: that the best vice-presidents are those who take on fewest tasks and avoid being restricted to ceremonial duties only.
“Carter and I changed what the vice-presidency did back in our days. Joe and I talked about this a couple of times when he was getting started,” Mr Mondale told the Financial Times. “It’s about the idea of being a close adviser to the president and tackling difficult issues and tough diplomatic challenges, rather than taking on line duties and rote activities.”
CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS
Gaffe-prone veteran who proves his worth when times are tough
Joe Biden’s long and varied experience in the Senate has proved invaluable to President Barack Obama over the past 18 months. Since January, Democrats have been one vote short of the super-majority they need to ram legislation through the upper house of Congress, meaning the vice-president has often been called on to lobby his old Capitol Hill colleagues. This role will become more crucial still during the next few months, with control of both chambers of Congress hanging in the balance ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Mr Biden has also acted as the Senate man in the White House, advising the administration on how lawmakers are likely to receive their ideas. “I think that being in the Senate for as many years as he has, he had a very solid, intuitive feel for what it means for a government policy to work and what it means for it to flop,” says Jared Bernstein, Mr Biden’s senior economic adviser.
The upper house was Mr Biden’s life for 36 years, and he continues to spend a lot of time there, even when he does not need to. He still uses the gym – although he could exercise at his residence or in the White House – because so much business is done there. According to Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think-tank, who has known Mr Biden for more than 30 years: “He is very active – he will make calls to individual senators, will figure out what’s going on, figure out who or what to put pressure on, when to intervene with [majority leader Harry] Reid and when to stay out.”
Over the years, Mr Biden has developed close relationships with those on the other side of the aisle. Take health legislation as an example. At the start of the presidency, he was among those telling Mr Obama that the worst recession in decades was not the right time to embark on reform. The administration pressed on anyway, keeping the vice-president largely out of the picture. “I don’t think they were encouraging him to go out there and bat the stump, first because they knew his own views and because the last thing they wanted was an irreparable gaffe,” says one former administration official.
But, in the face of opposition protests that rattled some lawmakers’ commitment, that attitude changed. “We needed someone with the experience to know when someone had an issue, even when they were saying that they were fine,” the former official says. The vice-president began talking to key Democrats as well as potential Republican supporters of reform, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine. In the end, though without a single Republican vote, the bill passed the upper chamber on Christmas eve.
In the Oval Office, Mr Biden has proved he can remain blunt-talking Joe in private but on-message in public. He is known for cutting through the “bureaucratese”. “He’s often the last person in the room who can give the president unvarnished, unbiased advice,” says Ron Klain, Mr Biden’s widely respected chief of staff. Short of the boss going, he notes, “The vice-president is the only person who can’t get fired and can’t get promoted.”
If there is one thing that Mr Obama – a former professor with a penchant for the Socratic method – encourages, it is open and vigorous debate among his senior staff, aides say. “The president has been very encouraging of dissenting opinion, especially among the most senior people. He has never taken offence at someone speaking contrary to what they perceive to be his own views,” says Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader in the Senate who now serves as an outside adviser to Mr Obama. “In fact, he wants dissent. When it comes to the budget, the economy, healthcare, financial regulation, he wants the full spectrum of opinion,” he says.
Mr Obama often uses Mr Biden as his proxy in these meetings. “The president likes to listen,” says another senior adviser. “He will encourage the vice-president to ask pointed questions or challenge assumptions, not because he couldn’t but because the president likes to watch others talk about things and absorb it, rather than being the interlocutor himself.”
Their different personality types also play into the way Mr Obama runs Oval Office meetings, say people who have attended top-level meetings with both men. “Barack Obama is cool and cerebral. If anything he is too detached, too aloof. He can be sharp and sarcastic but he never gets into a purple rage,” says one former administration official. “Biden is more like Bill Clinton. He is very emotional, very animated and voluble. He is a back-slapping politician and he’s really in your face,” she adds.
Born in working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942, the son of a used-car salesman, Mr Biden offers some street cred to Mr Obama’s elitist image and has a feel for the way policies will play out on Main Street. “The vice-president is often seeing several moves ahead on the chess board than everyone else,” says someone who regularly attends Oval Office meetings. “He often tells everyone how he sees this playing out, how this will resonate with ordinary people.”
While his input is central to the way the president makes decisions, “[Biden] seldom wins,” says the former official. Nonetheless, she adds: “He always gets it done, regardless of which side he was on.”
Indeed, the vice-president opposed two of the biggest decisions Mr Obama made last year: embarking upon healthcare reform in the face of the worst recession in 70 years, and to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
The temperature may have been touching 55°C, the location one of the most fortified on earth, but Mr Biden was in element. This month as he administered, on Independence Day, the ceremony to give American citizenship to soldiers from 60 nations gathered at the al-Faw Palace in Baghdad, the former chairman of the influential Senate foreign relations committee, could not help but savour the irony.
“Here we are in the hunting lodge of a dictator who subjugated a people … and we’re in the middle of this marble palace, making a lie of everything that he stood for,” said the self-taught foreign policy wonk, adding, with a cheeky grin: “I find it delicious that that’s happening.”
Less appetising were remarks about Mr Biden in relation to America’s main foreign policy challenge: Afghanistan. In a Rolling Stone magazine article<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236>, a senior adviser to Gen McChrystal reportedly dismissively referred to Mr Biden as “Bite Me”. The remark illuminated strategic disputes at the heart of policy towards the war. While the general championed a counter-insurgency strategy based on an escalation in troop numbers, Mr Biden was expressing doubts, proposing a “counter-terrorism plus” plan for a more limited and more targeted mission. Despite his later failure, it was a battle the general won.
The fact that, in his first 18 months, the vice-president has seldom been on the winning end of an argument frustrates some of his old allies. “Biden gets a chance to say his piece and by all accounts he does,” says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and an old friend. “But what he proposes and what Obama decides shows his influence,” he says, citing Afghanistan.
There have been a number of recent briefings and chats with senior alliance and British policymakers suggesting that, in Europe at least, the Afghan tide may be turning back in towards Mr Biden’s approach. At a time of financial austerity it is increasingly hard to argue in favour of a war that has clearly run into difficulties. So people are starting to float the idea that the scaled-down approach may make sense after all. This is far from formal policy, and the new UK defence secretary is against it.
Other administration officials and advisers pay little heed to the fact that Mr Biden seldom appears to be on the winning side of an argument. They say this is no reflection of the quality of his advice, but instead a reflection of the kind of organisation the president has built around himself.
“He wants to be the gas pedal and he wants Joe Biden to be the brakes,” says Mr Daschle, adding that the president realises there are limits to how much he can change so quickly. “If you have two gas pedals you are going to crash at some time. But a gas pedal and a brake might work if you both have control of the steering wheel,” he says.

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