Posted on 09/17/2009 10:25:43 AM PDT by Ben Mugged
On a Sunday afternoon not long after he was elected vice president, Joe Biden recalls, he learned a lesson about his new station in life.
Biden was finishing up a call with his new chief of staff, Ron Klain, when he dropped the news that his friend Ted Kaufman would be filling his Senate seat.
“Did you tell the president?” asked Klain, who, as an aide to Al Gore, had learned something about vice presidents and their place.
“Why the hell should I tell the president?” Biden remembers thinking.
After all, for 36 years, Biden had been his own man, rising to the Senate’s upper echelons and answering to no one except the voters of Delaware. But Klain’s question caught him up short — a teaching moment Biden would face on several more occasions, and could again — while working to define his role as vice president and tame an oversize personality and a gift for gaffes.
“It dawned on me that Ron was right,” he said in a recent interview with POLITICO. “What if Ted ended up being a jewel thief? It’s not going to be, ‘Well, Biden ... ’ It’s going to be Barack. He’s going to get the blame.”
He called President Barack Obama with the news about Kaufman. But he acknowledges that his instincts are not yet naturally deferential.
“That’s been the hardest part” of adjusting to his new job, said Biden. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I hope I’m getting better at it. Because I’m confident the other part is really working well. I am really satisfied with and actually excited about my ability to be value-added and to be involved in this.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Yup - a coffee spit on screen moment. good thing I didn’t have that afternoon cup uet. :)
uet = yet
Oh, could this reticence to defer to Obama be viewed as racist? Could Biden just not find it natural to defer to a black man? Hmmmmm.
Say what you like about John McCain, but when you look at who he picked for his running mate, and you look at who Barack Obama picked, it’s pretty obvious at this point who better choice, and it’s not the guy who won the election.
That’s my guess. He just doesn’t have the confidence that an African American can do as good a job as he can. What say you, Jimmah C?
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