Hidin' Biden
source: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1854640,00.html
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Anyone who has watched Joe Biden over 35 years in the Senate might have a little bit of trouble recognizing the guy who is running to be Barack Obama's Vice President. Oh, yes, he looks like the same fellow. But traveling with Biden during this campaign has sometimes been like reporting on a politician packaged in shrink-wrap. While his windy, off-point pontification was the stuff of legend among his Senate colleagues, Biden is now leashed to a teleprompter even when he is talking in a high school gym that is three-quarters empty. The exposure hound who in recent years appeared more often than any other guest on the Sunday talk shows is a virtual stranger to the small band of reporters on his plane — less accessible than even Sarah Palin is to her traveling pack of bloodhounds. And Biden keeps to a schedule that provides a minimum of off-the-cuff encounters with voters, except across a rope line.
As risky as it can be to let Biden step away from the teleprompter, it is in these moments that he can be most affecting. When he made a rare unscheduled stop at an ice cream parlor in Charleston, W.Va., Biden encountered the owner's daughter, a 28-year-old woman who told him she had suffered a brain aneurysm last December similar to the one that nearly killed Biden in 1988. The Senator threw an arm around Sara Beal's neck, pulled her to him and whispered in her ear. By the time he let her go about five minutes later, planting a kiss on top of her head, both of them were near tears.
Biden has a breadth of expertise that comes from having served as chairman of the Judiciary and the Foreign Relations committees in the Senate, two substance-heavy posts. But his ability to maneuver in either of those areas as Veep might quickly run him afoul of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of State. Biden will want a big say in helping decide who in an Obama Administration would get those two posts, if only because he will know how to get Obama's choices confirmed in the Senate better than anyone else. But those close to Biden say the model he would follow would more likely be that of Mondale. As one put it, "Joe Biden is the ultimate got-your-back kind of guy, and whatever that ends up meaning, that is what he'll do for Obama."
As risky as it can be to let Biden step away from the teleprompter, it is in these moments that he can be most affecting. When he made a rare unscheduled stop at an ice cream parlor in Charleston, W.Va., Biden encountered the owner's daughter, a 28-year-old woman who told him she had suffered a brain aneurysm last December similar to the one that nearly killed Biden in 1988. The Senator threw an arm around Sara Beal's neck, pulled her to him and whispered in her ear. By the time he let her go about five minutes later, planting a kiss on top of her head, both of them were near tears.
Biden has a breadth of expertise that comes from having served as chairman of the Judiciary and the Foreign Relations committees in the Senate, two substance-heavy posts. But his ability to maneuver in either of those areas as Veep might quickly run him afoul of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of State. Biden will want a big say in helping decide who in an Obama Administration would get those two posts, if only because he will know how to get Obama's choices confirmed in the Senate better than anyone else. But those close to Biden say the model he would follow would more likely be that of Mondale. As one put it, "Joe Biden is the ultimate got-your-back kind of guy, and whatever that ends up meaning, that is what he'll do for Obama."
