Ryan Lizza on Joe Biden

In this week's New Yorker Ryan Lizza profiles Biden breifly.

Of interest to me were these excerpts -

not long after Biden ended his own Presidential campaign, Obama approached him to ask for his support in the remaining primaries. Biden is close to Bill and Hillary Clinton (she once told him, “I think you and Bill were separated at birth”), and he said that he would stay neutral until the nomination was settled. “If you win, I’ll do anything you ask me to do,” Biden told Obama. Obama replied, “Be careful, because I may ask you a lot.” They had another conversation in February, and Obama continued to cajole him. “The only question I have is not whether I want you in this Administration,” Obama told Biden. “It’s which job you’d like best.”During the primaries, which continued until June, Obama and Biden spoke about twice a week. “He’d call not so much to ask for advice as to bounce things off me,”

I like this, which demonstrates Obama's interest in pragmatism and how to get things done:

The conversation in Minneapolis ranged from foreign policy and possible appointments to the federal courts to the legislative strategy that would be needed to pass an Obama agenda. Obama wanted to know how Biden had managed his signature achievements—such as the 1994 crime bill, which added a hundred thousand federally funded police officers to city streets.

And then this (emphasis mine)

he official story behind Obama’s Vice-Presidential choice is that Obama was won over by Biden’s ability to get support from Republicans in the Senate. In Biden’s telling, Obama liked his sense of empathy, a trait that Obama shares, to judge by the finely sketched characters in “Dreams from My Father,” his 1995 memoir. Biden told me that Senator Mike Mansfield, of Montana—who persuaded him to stay in the Senate in 1973, when he was distraught over the deaths of his wife and child—taught him that, no matter how reprehensible another senator’s views, his job was to figure out what was good in that person, what voters back home saw in him. It may be a sentimental view of how senators treated each other in an earlier age, but Biden suggested to me that when he repeated that to Obama it helped to bring them closer—and he said that he and Obama would bring that approach to Washington.

And the reason Biden is long beloved by me:

As a longtime chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Biden was at the center of many of the hard-fought debates of the culture wars, and many conservatives still resent him for leading the fight against Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Bork, a strict constructionist, expressed his views freely, and Biden had little trouble using Bork’s past opinions to embarrass him.

This is also helpful:

By 2002, Biden’s brand of liberal interventionism was the consensus view among foreign-policy élites in the Democratic Party. During the 2002 Senate debate over the Iraq-war resolution, Biden occupied the political space between Bush Administration unilateralists and antiwar Democrats. He pressed for a resolution that would have allowed the President to use force only to disarm Iraq. (In the end, Biden’s proposal was undermined by Democrats who supported Bush’s version of the war resolution.)

Biden's Brief can be read in full here.

Biden versus Hillary as VP - The Numbers

The New Republic asked last week if Biden can "Out-Hillary Hillary"

The principal rationale for selecting Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama's running mate is that she would have united Democrats behind their nominee at a time when they have a substantial advantage in party identification. John Kerry received 89 percent of the Democratic vote in 2004; if Barack Obama can get within a couple of points of that, even to 86 or 87 percent, he will be very difficult to defeat.

However, Joe Biden might do nearly as good a job as Clinton of uniting the party, while perhaps paying less of a price among independents.

Rasmussen has fresh approval numbers out for Biden, as well as several other Democratic short-listers. Here, borrowed from Rasmussen's invaluable subscriber service, are their approval scores by party:

Click here to see the rest

Peggy Noonan on Biden

Hat tip to Sullivan who brought this to my attention. Worth quoting:

The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations--as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back--you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He's human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

Read the whole piece here. (mostly about the Alito hearings)

Thoughts On Biden, Before He Was VP Pick

Mark Halperin from Time Magazine posted an anonymous memo from a Democratic strategist I want to reproduce in full here, as it echoes some of my own thoughts. Note that this was circulated before Biden was in fact selected.

“Biden is deeply thoughtful, serious, passionate, experienced, highly knowledgeable, and incredibly sensible and clear when talking about major issues. He has a vast and creative understanding of politics and policy, a sharp mind, and a sincere heart. He’s totally ready to be president. Together, Obama and Biden would represent the best of the last 30 years of the Democratic Party, and the hope for the next 30.”

“Biden may be a ridiculous, overbearing blowhard, and he’ll doubtless make foolish blunders and imprudent comments if he’s on the ticket, but he’d still be an excellent campaigner, surrogate, and debater. He’d be thrilled at the prospect of being vice president (his own aspirations aside), and grateful and proud to have been chosen–he’d work hard to make Obama look good, and not deliberately outshine him–plus the chemistry will be appealing, and they genuinely like and respect each other, which will be winningly apparent.”

“Also, America is no longer a place where citizens care about plagiarism or hair plugs. A Biden pick would immediately elevate Obama’s gravitas, give him a semblance of humility, delight the media, and reassure the nation that a grownup is involved. Democrats would be simultaneously relieved and apprehensive, but they’d be pleased with the choice overall. Plus, Biden is Catholic, is a Washington insider in a good way (a hardworking man of the people unchanged by three decades inside the Beltway), and has a tragic history with a happy ending.”

Here's David Brooks - Hoping It's Biden

Also worth checking out is Josh Marshall re-posting of a 2004 interview he did with Biden.

Back in 2004, I sat down for an at-length interview with Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) in his office on Capitol Hill. The context of the time was the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry, and the foreign policy particulars of four years ago. But I think it's still a very valuable prism to understand how he thinks about foreign policy. Biden is going to do plenty of interviews about foreign policy questions over the next two months. But it will be in the context of his running as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. So obviously he'll be more careful, more scripted, less willing to think outloud about Iraq, Afghanistan and the differences between Democratic and Republican foreign policy thinking.