Senator Joe Biden listens to his iPod aboard the Obama campaign plane en route to Washington, D.C., from Greensboro, N.C.
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Meanwhile, the no-drama Obama campaign has deployed Biden to the smallest hardscrabble corners of America's swing states, where he makes common cause by invoking his own working-class roots in Scranton, Pa. He speaks of his father, who told Biden to always get up when he got knocked down. He says he wishes his mother could be there to say, "God bless ya." Biden even invokes his 10-year-old granddaughter Finnegan, whose favorite expression--"Hellooo?"--sums up Biden's reaction to the efforts of his "old dear friend" McCain to distance himself from George W. Bush.
The crowds that Biden draws are smaller and older than the throngs at Obama's megarallies. A disproportionate number wear windbreakers and sweatshirts that identify them as members of unions representing mine workers, firefighters and painters. Flashing his 250-watt set of teeth, Biden rarely fails to bring them to their feet with a stump speech that goes from thunder ("I've had enough! Our country has had enough!") to whispered intimacy ("Ladies and gentlemen, it's about dignity") and back again ("I love ya! Get up, Virginia! Get up!").
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.
At that same stop, a reporter shouted a question about McCain's new ad featuring Biden's comments in Seattle and got no answer beyond stony silence. In the two days that I was aboard his Boeing 737 campaign plane, Biden ventured only a few steps outside his cabin at the front of the plane, which kept him safely away from the reporters at the back. When Biden suddenly appeared at the door to the main cabin, Dallas Morning News reporter Todd Gillman attempted to take a snapshot--a not-uncommon occurrence aboard a campaign plane--and was told by a campaign staffer, "We prefer that you not take photos." According to a blog post by Ryan Corsaro, the cbs News embed on the Biden plane, the candidate has not taken questions from the journalists aboard his plane since Sept. 7, but he has done numerous interviews with local reporters. That is typically safer terrain, though in one contentious television interview on Oct. 23, an Orlando anchorwoman asked him whether Obama is a Marxist. For once, even Biden--who did the interview from North Carolina--seemed dumbfounded. "Are you joking?" he asked.
So what kind of Vice President would Biden be? His relationship with Obama is still in its formative phase, but history may hold some clues. It has been 48 years since a sitting Senator has been elected President, but in that time, five went directly from the Senate to the vice presidency. Some of them--Walter Mondale comes to mind--served as all-purpose advisers and troubleshooters for the President. Others chose specific portfolios--as Al Gore did in taking charge of areas like the environment, technology and reorganizing the operation of the Executive Branch.