With Disputes Brewing, Biden Turns to Senate

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/politics/02caucus.html?ref=us

By JOHN HARWOOD
Published: February 1, 2009

The first thing you notice is how happy he is. Walking into a suite that until recently was Dick Cheney’s turf, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is smiling — big time.


Stephen Crowley/The New York Times


“I wasn’t at all sure whether there was a right place for me” in the Obama administration, the vice president said.

“All the years you covered me, I never, quite frankly, thought about the vice presidency,” Mr. Biden, a former Delaware senator, said in an interview last week in what was once the secretary of war’s office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. “And when President Obama asked me to join him, I wasn’t at all sure whether there was a right place for me,” he said, adding, “But it’s working out.”

For a loquacious 66-year-old whose career has seen family tragedy, a health crisis and two failed presidential runs, that is a rare understatement. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said, “It’s an adjustment for Joe — every day is like Christmas.”

Mr. Biden will need good humor for his first new job since Richard M. Nixon’s presidency. And now his skills face unexpectedly early tests — in the administration’s effort to prevent its economic stimulus package from becoming a partisan exercise, and in trying to salvage Tom Daschle’s nomination for health and human services secretary despite controversy over previously unpaid taxes.

The vice president has not surrendered his edgy, sometimes impolitic sense of humor. After publicly tweaking Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. during their first days in high office for bungling Mr. Obama’s inaugural oath (the president appeared unamused), Mr. Biden elbowed their predecessors last week by greeting labor union officials with a tart “Welcome back to the White House.”

Nor has he shed his propensity to rattle press aides. In the interview, his comments on the financial industry bailout and on union-organizing legislation left administration staff members scrambling to make clear that he was not articulating new policy or diverging from Mr. Obama’s position.

FULL story at link.