The American Vice Presidency (85 page)

Instead, he threw his support behind Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, like-minded on the quagmire the Iraq War had become. But Kerry
fell victim to unwarranted smears against his combat service in Vietnam and renewed jingoism stirred up by Bush supporters, and he lost narrowly. Biden began to consider running for president again in 2008, especially when Kerry decided not to try a second time.

In January 2007, Biden declared his intention to seek the Democratic nomination again, vowing not to make the mistakes that had forced him from the presidential arena two decades earlier. He seemed well aware of and adjusted to the odds against him, running against the popular former first lady Hillary Clinton and an engaging newcomer, Senator Barack Obama, seeking to become the first African American president.

In the campaign, it was clear from the start that the Democratic candidates’ positions on the war in Iraq would be critical. Biden joined in sponsoring a nonbinding resolution in the Senate against Bush’s surge of twenty thousand troops into the country, but it fell four votes short and was dropped. A bigger political problem for Biden was the lack of campaign money and the appeal of Senator Clinton to women and of Senator Obama to the black community. Though Biden continued to be a leading voice against the war in Iraq, calling for repeal of the 2002 authorization to Bush for use of force, he could get no traction, particularly with a proposal to partition the country.

Biden continued his penchant for delivering long and detailed speeches on the stump, but he demonstrated his awareness of the problem with good humor at a nationally televised debate in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when asked by the moderator if he could manage this time around to curb his verbosity. He replied, “Yes,” and flashed a broad smile. More seriously, his thoughtful responses in the string of debates during 2007 and early 2008 drew praise and statements of agreement from the other contenders, including Obama. The Biden campaign capitalized on the phenomenon by running a television ad that said simply what his challengers were saying: “Joe’s right.” But Biden found himself lost in the pack, seldom called on early or often to comment in the debates. In one of them, when finally invited by the moderator, he feigned surprise and said, “Oh, no, no, no, no! Don’t do it, no! Don’t make me speak!”
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In the first 2008 voting in the Iowa precinct caucuses, he finished fifth with an abysmally embarrassing 1 percent and dropped out, recognizing that too much time had passed and he was no match for Obama and
Clinton. He returned to the Senate again, telling a Wilmington reporter that he was not interested in being secretary of state or vice president if the next administration was a Democratic one. “I can have much more influence, I promise you, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee than I can as vice president,” he said.
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Once Biden was out of the race, Obama approached him in late January for help in the remaining primaries, but Biden told him he intended to remain neutral until the voters had picked the party nominee. He promised both Obama and Clinton that he would work tirelessly for whichever of them won. “If you win,” he told Obama, “I’ll do anything you ask me to do,” to which Obama replied, according to Biden later, “Be careful, because I may ask you a lot.” Biden said Obama told him, “The only question I have is not whether I want you in this administration. It’s which job you’d like best.”
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Once Obama decided that if he were to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, husband Bill might be “too big a complication,” he chose Biden, according to Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We knew Biden could be somewhat long-winded and had a history of coloring outside the lines a bit,” Plouffe said later, “but honestly, that was very appealing to Obama, because he wanted someone to give him the unvarnished truth. What do you need in a vice president? He knows and understands Congress, has great foreign policy and domestic experience. He had the whole package from a VP standpoint.”
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What finally persuaded Biden to accept the nomination was Obama’s promise, if elected, to involve him as a governing partner in the new administration.

In the fall campaign Biden dutifully took on the task of engaging the Republican opposition. After describing the GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, as “genuinely a friend” of his and a courageous war hero, Biden insisted, “You can’t change America and end the war in Iraq when you declare ‘no one has supported President Bush in Iraq more than I have,’ … when you know your first four years as president will look exactly like the last eight years of George Bush’s presidency.”
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And in a rap at Cheney while he was at it, Biden told the Democratic National Convention in Denver, “No longer will the eight most dreaded words in the English language be: ‘The vice president’s office is on the phone!’ ”
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Biden’s potentially most dangerous event was his debate with McCain’s
surprise running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a charismatic and aggressive newcomer on the national stage. But he remained cordial toward her while demonstrating a clearly firmer grasp of the issues raised and focusing on McCain as a willing heir to the policies of George W. Bush, now sinking in the popularity polls. A postdebate poll by United Press International found Biden the clear winner, though Palin was credited with exceeding the low expectations set for her. When at a fund-raiser in Seattle Biden blurted that Obama probably would be tested in an early international crisis, Obama was reported later to have chewed out his running mate for the gaffe,
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but after the campaign Obama said of Biden’s performance in the primaries, “He could be a very disciplined candidate, so that was not a major concern to me.”
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On Election Day, the ticket of Obama and Biden prevailed with 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 345 in the electoral college compared with 45.7 percent of the popular ballots and 173 electoral votes for McCain and Palin.

In the transition period, Biden said he intended to “restore the balance” in the vice presidency, seeming to suggest he would return it to its subordinate while still significant role in the executive branch, rather than the dominant role it appeared to have played under Cheney in the previous administration. Biden followed Cheney’s practice of staffing the vice president’s office with ranking specialists in foreign and diplomatic policy and economic affairs paralleling those on the president’s staff. But these specialists were to be integrated into the White House operation rather than forming the separate power center that had evolved under Cheney.

Once sworn in, Biden embarked on a trip for Obama to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to make a personal assessment of the policy in place, and at home he undertook oversight of the implementation of the new president’s economic stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He became the prime contact point for governors, mayors, and other local officials in tracking progress and problems around the country. Although Biden had signed on to be a general adviser, he agreed to chair the new Middle Class Task Force as close to his interests, dealing with child care, elderly care, college student assistance, and savings for retirement.

In the first weeks of his administration, Obama also sent Biden to the annual European conference on security in Munich, where he reported the
new president’s determination “to set a new tone not only in Washington but in America’s relations around the world,” to “work in a partnership wherever we can, and alone only when he must,” striving “to act preventively, not preemptively … starting with diplomacy.”
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Biden pledged to “press the reset button” with Russia to halt “a dangerous drift” in relations with that old enemy, while giving assurance to former members of the Soviet Union of U.S. recognition of their sovereignty.
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That summer he went to Ukraine and Georgia for the same purpose.

As Obama considered requests from the American generals for more ground troops beyond the twenty-one thousand he had already agreed to send to Afghanistan, Biden reminded him of the original mission of rooting out al Qaeda terrorists. A compromise was struck for which Biden was said to have persuaded the president to proceed on a limited basis. Such advice was in keeping with his own role as a team player compared with Cheney in the previous administration, which he called “a divided government” between “Cheney and his own sort of separate national security agency and … the [official] National Security Agency.”
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In late August, the NATO and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, pushed Obama on the request for more ground troops, pointedly warning that unless more were sent in the next year, defeat of the insurgents might not be achievable. In response, over the next three months the president plunged into ten closed-door meetings with chief military, diplomatic, and political advisers at Camp David, with Biden at his side tenaciously arguing against what he saw as a drift from the counterterrorism mission that had justified the initial troop deployments. As a kibitzing Cheney accused Obama of “dithering” and inviting defeat, Biden dug in as the devil’s advocate against the demands of the generals.

The result was a compromise in which McChrystal would get a surge of additional troops, but with a deadline of July 2011 to start their withdrawal. Biden argued that the strategy was what was important, not the number of troops added. In an Oval Office meeting in November, Obama polled the military chiefs, and they all signed on, committing to the timetable.
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Later, when Obama was asked what he thought of critics’ view that Biden had “lost” that debate, he said, “I don’t think anyone who was party to the very, very exhaustive discussions we had would say that. Joe was enormously helpful in guiding those discussions. The decision that ultimately
emerged was a synthesis of some of the advice he gave me, along with the advice of the generals.”
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As the troop surge progressed amid continued criticism from Democratic liberals, Biden repeatedly insisted unequivocally that the timetable for starting to pull American combat troops from Afghanistan would hold and subsequently would be completed by 2014.

In January 2014, former Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, a Republican carryover from the George W. Bush administration, in a memoir accused Biden of “poisoning the well” against the military leaders supporting the surge. “All too early in the administration,” Gates wrote, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the vice president—became a problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.… I think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” A White House spokesperson swiftly defended the vice president, asserting, “From his leadership in the Balkans in the Senate, to his effort to end the war in Ira, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world. President Obama relies on his good counsel every day.”

In the fall of 2010, Biden turned to the customary political role of vice presidents in working to maintain Democratic control of Congress in the midterm elections. But Republicans nevertheless won a majority in the House of Representatives with a surge of their own, from an emerging conservative Tea Party movement. The result was a stiffly obstructionist opposition party that flowered a bitter partisanship in Washington for the rest of Obama’s first term.

Winding down his oversight of the American Recovery Act, in early 2011 Biden was assigned as the administration’s “legislative fireman” in debt-ceiling and deficit-reduction battles that dragged on through the next two years. With his decades-long experience on Capitol Hill, he led budget negotiations with new House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, paving the way for Obama’s direct intervention but ultimately falling short of a ballyhooed “grand bargain” with Boehner to swap tax cuts for new revenue. The result was an agreement on a “sequestration” of deep mandatory cuts in domestic and military spending if no other agreement could be reached by the end of 2012.
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It was not,
providing only an unsatisfactory coda in the continued debate over deficit reduction.

As the 2012 presidential campaign approached, Biden turned to the political wars, among some fanciful press speculations that he might be dropped from the Democratic ticket in favor of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, despite her disavowal of interest and Obama’s reinforced support of his vice president. Biden precipitated one minor flap in May when on
Meet the Press
he volunteered that he had come to accept same-sex marriage, at a time when Obama was silent on the controversial matter. Cast by some as an embarrassment to the president, it actually served to smoke him out on an issue of increasing strength and significance to party liberals, who were growing restive about the cautious and pragmatic leader of their party. Of that occasion Biden said later, “There’s never been a time when I’ve said anything substantively … that I don’t think or know he’s already there. I knew where he was, but a lot of people said, ‘Well, maybe I should have let him say “I’m coming with gay marriage,” ’ but for me it was a matter of basic civil rights.” The next morning, Biden recalled, Obama “came in laughing and said, ‘Well, you told me.… I knew you’d say what you think.’ ”
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In the fall campaign, after Obama had stumbled badly with a flat performance in his first debate against the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, Biden was credited with recovering for the Democratic ticket with an aggressive debate confrontation with the GOP running mate, Paul Ryan. Biden said later that after it looked like he and the president “needed a bump,” he took on Romney for his disparagement of “47 percent of Americans” as people who are bribed by federal benefits and Ryan for dividing the populace into “takers and makers.”