Biden Forges Old-School Vice Presidency, More Mondale than Cheney

By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s been laying on the praise so thick for his vice president that even a guy as self-deprecating as Joe Biden might wonder if Obama’s messing with him.

“We call him ‘The Sheriff,’” Obama said recently, talking about how he’s asked Biden to oversee implementation of the $787 billion economic stimulus. “Nobody messes with Joe,” the president said in his first formal address to Congress.

After less than two months in office, Obama also has called on Biden, 66, to act as a foreign-policy emissary, run a middle-class task force, stand in on national network morning shows and round up support for the administration by tapping allies in organized labor and friends from both political parties on Capitol Hill.

Entrusted with far more than funerals and ribbon cuttings, Biden’s responded with deference and gratitude, but hasn’t quite curbed his penchant for stream-of-consciousness monologues and wisecracks that makes Obama uneasy …

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Our Clever President

A Commentary By Tony Blankley | Rasmussen Reports

President Barack Obama’s first presidential news conference was performed feebly by the once-ferocious White House press corps and shrewdly — if deceptively — by the president. In the six years I did communications on former President Ronald Reagan’s White House staff, I don’t recall a single news conference in which there were no follow-up questions, no challenges to anything the president had said recently, no assertions of fact that the president was challenged to deal with. In fact, I don’t remember former President Bill Clinton, either, ever getting a full 45-minute prime-time news conference pass.

Yet Monday night, all the questions but one were of the “please, sir, could you tell us how you plan to deal with x?” variety. Only Major Garrett of Fox News raised even a slightly embarrassing question: What was Vice President Joe Biden referring to when he said the administration had a 30 percent chance of failing at some initiative? And I must confess that if I had been the vice president, I would not have been happy with the president’s answer, which was, in essence: I don’t know what Biden was talking about, but that sounds like him …

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