Biden: Muzzle Off

Muzzle off, Biden breaks his record silence

By: Carol E. Lee
December 20, 2008

Barack Obama’s transition team has kept Joe Biden under wraps longer than any vice-president going back at least 20 years – longer even than Dan Quayle.

Biden’s first interview as vice president-elect airs Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” – 47 days after the election, setting a modern record. Democratic sources say the president-elect hasn’t been trying to muzzle Biden – who drew a public rebuff from Obama at least twice in the campaign for going off-message.

But Biden’s Sunday interview, as well as a one-on-one Monday with CNN’s Larry King, signal a new phase in the transition, one where Biden will take a more visible role, including working Capitol Hill to drum up support for an economic stimulus package before the inauguration.

Instead, they say these interviews, including one Monday with CNN’s Larry King, are evidence of a new phase in the transition, one where Biden will take a more visible role, including working Capitol Hill to drum up support for an economic stimulus package before the inauguration.

“You’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the days and weeks to come,” said a Democratic official involved with the transition. “We had a very narrow window of time starting the day after the election to ramp up and get all the Cabinet positions filled,” the official said. “People still want to hear from the people in place for the next administration, and this is sort of an obvious progression.”

The newfound publicity also marks Biden’s latest evolution within a disciplined Obama operation that has watered down the public traits that made Joe Biden, Joe Biden – the long-winded speeches, the off-the-cuff quips, even the gaffes. A hint of Biden and Obama’s contrasting styles was briefly on display last week, when the vice president-elect joined the president-elect to announce the energy team in Chicago. There was a bottleneck as the group exited the news conference because Biden was congratulating the nominees. “Come on, Joe,” Obama said off mic, “Stop holding up...”

A look to vice presidents past suggests Obama’s team is rolling out Biden a lot more gingerly than others before him – despite his 36 years in the Senate and experience as a fixture on the Sunday morning shows.

Since the election, Biden has delivered prepared remarks a handful of times, only speaking at three of President-elect Obama’s 12 news conferences, and he has taken no questions from the press corps.

By contrast, Dick Cheney was briefing reporters and sat for round after round of television interviews in the weeks following the 2000 election, during the Florida recount. Cheney gave interviews to two Sunday morning news shows four days after he became vice president-elect when Al Gore conceded on Dec. 13, 2000.

Dan Quayle gave an interview to The New York Times that published November 20, just a couple weeks after the 1988 election. Al Gore did his first interview as vice president-elect with Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation on Dec. 13, 1992.

Walter Mondale also gave a lengthy interview to the Times toward the end of December, noted Joel Goldstein, an expert on the vice presidency who teaches law at Saint Louis University.

Biden has certainly given the Obama transition reasons to be nervous. During the campaign, Biden called raising taxes on the wealthy “patriotic.” He told CBS’s Katie Couric he thought the Obama ad attacking Sen. John McCain’s lack of computer skills was “terrible.” Biden informed an Ohio voter that he and Obama were against clean-coal technology – except that, Obama was for it. He said mega-insurer AIG should not receive a government bailout, when Obama had taken caution to say he wouldn’t “second-guess” the government and criticized McCain’s for having a knee-jerk anti-bailout reaction.

Obama had to step in on that one, saying on NBC’s “Today” show, “I think that, in that situation, I think Joe should have waited as well.”

Two weeks before the election, Obama again had to address an off-message comment from his running mate. Biden had said that within six months Obama would be tested by an international crisis, a remark the McCain campaign seized upon.

“I think that Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes,” Obama told reporters in Richmond, Virginia, “but I think that his core point was that the next administration is going to be tested regardless of who it is.”

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