Vice President Joe Biden
(3 of 5)
And then he delivers it as if the world could end. "They don't get us. They don't get who we are," he thunders in Steubenville, Ohio. "We're like everybody else, man," he cries out in Martins Ferry a day later. "We're like the rich guys. We dream." The rich guys are Romney and his pals, and they want the "financialization of every product." Biden says Romney's financial background no more prepares him for the White House than a plumber's background would. "And by the way, there are a lot of awful smart plumbers," he adds. Sometimes he shouts from the microphone, which cheers the Romney guys in Boston. They can't wait to string it all together, the crazy-man Biden reel. After all, they point out, Joe is nobody's savior at the polls. Biden's national favorability isn't good. In swing states, it is even worse: 40% favorable and 54% unfavorable. That's worse than Romney's national numbers, and Biden, who may have been dragged down by his attack posture, is already far better known.
But Biden never retreats, and he won't rule out running in 2016 for the top job. He knows the jokes. He hears the Tea Party protesters chanting "Uncle Joe has got to go" behind the Secret Service cordon. When the Onion published a fake story about him polishing his Pontiac Trans Am shirtless in the White House driveway, he came back over the top. "You think I'd drive a Trans Am?" he told Car and Driver. "I have been in my bathing suit in my driveway and not only washed my Goodwood Green 1967 Corvette but also simonized it"--as if the Onion writer had ever heard of simonizing. The $10 Joe Biden beer cozy that reads cheers champ is a best seller on the Obama campaign website, along with the T-shirt that reads HEALTH REFORM STILL A BFD. He's done Meet the Press 37 times since 2007, but it was only in his last appearance that he started saying "man" like some 1950s hepcat. "These guys wouldn't even let us put back to work 400,000 teachers, firefighters and cops by a 0.5% tax on the first dollar after the first million you made," he said of the Republicans in Congress. "C'mon, man."
The official line among senior aides at the White House is that Biden is performing above expectations. Even the gaffes are not as big a problem as they feared. That gay-marriage fumble--sure, it hurt, made the President look craven, but Biden did it for the right reason. "I'm never going to blame anybody for telling what they believe," Obama told the women of The View. In private, Biden acts as if he loves it. Speaking to a group of volunteers in North Carolina without a reporter in the room, he admits that the gaffes happen. But then he quotes the old saw. "In Washington, a gaffe is telling the truth," he says. The troops go wild. That's Joe, man.
The Guy Who Never Stops Talking