Biden carefully crafts role by staying in Obama’s orbit
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama summoned congressional leaders for an urgent meeting at the height of a fiscal crisis, Joe Biden wasn’t initially mentioned as a participant.
The vice president’s staff quickly followed up with reporters, in case any had been wondering: Biden would be there, too.
On another occasion, Biden let a crowd at a sandwich shop know he couldn’t linger. “The president is waiting,” he announced to the room. “I’m having lunch with him today.”
The two moments are emblematic of a vice president who has sought to make himself as central as possible in the orbit of influence in the White House without overstepping the vice president’s role in ways he has said had left a terrible aftertaste from the Bush White House, when Vice President Dick Cheney was seen as having an outsized influence.
It’s a delicate balance that has at times paid off for Biden, who built up important relationships with world leaders over his decades-long Senate career.
Obama has turned to his leadership and judgment at critical junctures in his presidency, validating Biden both publicly and privately.
On Sunday, Biden will depart for a week in Asia to meet with key leaders in a region where Obama has prominently committed to ramp up America’s influence. Biden’s visit to China, Japan and South Korea comes two months after Obama had to cancel his own Asia trip because of the partial government shutdown, leaving the White House seeking ways to prove it’s still serious about the Asia rebalance.
“Barack Obama was smart enough when elected president to know he didn’t know everything,” said Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat who’s known Biden since the 1970s. “One of the things he didn’t really have as good of a grasp on was our relationship with leaders around the world.”
Constitutionally, the vice president has only as much power as the president cares to give him or her. But as Obama’s twoterm deputy, Biden will see his political fortunes forever linked to the president. How the public ultimately perceives Obama’s presidency — and Biden’s role in it — will be critical to Biden if he runs for president again in 2016, as he plans to consider.
In a departure from some previous vice presidents, his aides say, Biden has never sought out specific assignments from the president. What matters is being where the action is, a key player on the issues of utmost importance to the administration, the aides said.
Nearly five years since entering the White House, it’s not hard to find signs that Obama has relied heavily on Biden and his staff at pivotal moments.
Obama called on Biden to lead his gun control campaign, a top priority at the start of the second term. The push in Congress failed, but the vice president emerged as a prominent voice for a liberal cause.
Obama has also turned repeatedly to Biden’s brain trust to fill key roles. The White House sent Biden’s top foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to meet secretly this year with Iranian officials about a possible nuclear deal while Biden aggressively lobbied his former Senate colleagues to hold off on new sanctions.
Biden was missing from October’s efforts to avert and later end the 16day government shutdown, which occurred when Republican attempts to derail the health care law delayed passage of a temporary spending bill.
Some Democratic senators said they were concerned that if Biden showed up, he’d be too eager to save the day and would hash out a deal that would give away far too much.
The White House disputes that was the reason Biden wasn’t heavily involved, arguing that Obama had decided he wouldn’t negotiate and didn’t want to send signals to the contrary.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University, said Biden ended up avoiding what could be a political burden.
“He stood out of the way,” Brinkley said. “Anybody involved in the shutdown, whose name is synonymous with the shutdown, would have egg on their face.”