For Biden, No Portfolio but the Role of a Counselor 0 comments
WASHINGTON — The day before Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s birthday last week, Barack Obama surprised him after lunch with candlelighted cupcakes. Within hours, the photograph of the president-elect and his running mate, smiling over the dessert, was on the evening news.
The photograph, circulated by Mr. Obama’s office, was meant to project unity, confidence and camaraderie. But while Mr. Obama has moved quickly to assemble his White House staff and the beginnings of a cabinet, he is lagging behind even the chronically late President Bill Clinton in bringing clarity to the role his vice president will play.
So far, Mr. Biden has not been given a defined portfolio, the way Al Gore was given the environment and technology in 1992. And Mr. Obama’s aides say they do not expect Mr. Biden to assume the kind of muscular role that Vice President Dick Cheney has played over the last eight years, although he is expected to put out a number of fires.
“I’m sure that there will be discrete assignments over time,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president-elect. “But I think his fundamental role is as a trusted counselor. I think that when Obama selected him, he selected him to be a counselor and an adviser on a broad range of issues.”
Mr. Biden has spent much of the three weeks since the election in Chicago, where he has worked closely with Mr. Obama. But while Mr. Obama held a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Mr. Biden was home in Delaware, having spent Monday night in Wilmington stuffing Christmas stockings with his wife for a charity event.
Mr. Biden seems to be adapting. He is hiring for his office, including a chief of staff, Ron Klain, who has worked with him since he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. With Mr. Obama having settled on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, Mr. Biden, whose most recent Senate post was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has privately told people that he recognizes he will not be the point man on foreign policy.
Mr. Biden has also interviewed candidates for chief economist, and associates say he is honing his economic credentials.
Mr. Biden has been keeping up with his outreach to foreign leaders; two weeks ago he called the three leading candidates for prime minister of Israel, Tzipi Livni, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. He has also reached out to President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia and Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union.
Mr. Biden is spending most weekdays in Chicago, where he stays in a hotel and has lunch once a week with Mr. Obama. During the days, Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and a coterie of advisers are in the team’s transition offices, going through possible hires. Mr. Biden has been involved in cabinet and policy decisions, offering advice to the president-elect, aides said.
Mr. Obama’s aides say Mr. Biden has backed the decision to appoint Mrs. Clinton secretary of state. “If he had made an argument against it, it would have carried a lot of weight,” a senior aide to the transition said. “He was totally in support of it.”
The lack of specificity stands in contrast to the more clearly defined role of Mr. Gore. Within days of Mr. Clinton’s election in 1992, advisers to the president-elect said Mr. Gore would be in charge of a broad initiative on science and technology, heralding what they promised would be a new era in which the government’s focus on making armaments would shift to fostering new civilian technologies and industries.
By early December 1992, even before Mr. Clinton had made any cabinet appointments, Mr. Gore was out in front on the environment, issuing a statement calling for an investigation of a hazardous-waste incinerator and signaling that the administration planned an aggressive approach to enforcing environmental laws.
During an interview with Gannett on Dec. 8, 1992, Mr. Clinton said Mr. Gore would have “certain specific responsibilities over and above” a general advisory role, including “lobbying the Congress on our program, especially in the health care area, dealing with issues related to the environment and technology.”
