Biden Sees Mondale, Not Cheney as Vice-Presidential Role Model

By Christopher Stern

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Vice President-elect Joe Biden relishes ridiculing his new job.

``We all know that the vice president's job ain't much,'' the Delaware senator said at a campaign stop last month in Tacoma, Washington. ``I understood that when I took the job.''

Biden, 65, knows he isn't going to be another Dick Cheney, who wielded so much influence he was sometimes perceived to eclipse his own boss, President George W. Bush.

``Biden will be more interested in carrying out the Obama agenda as opposed to his own agenda,'' said Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who has served with Biden in the Senate for 28 years. ``From time to time, Cheney was on his own agenda.''

That doesn't mean Biden won't be a central player in the new administration. His 36 years in the Senate -- including decades of leadership on the foreign affairs and judiciary committees -- fill important gaps for Obama, 47, who spent only two years in the Senate before entering the race for the White House.

``He values Biden's counsel on foreign policy,'' said David Axelrod, Obama's chief campaign strategist. Biden will have a say in major national-security decisions and Cabinet appointments, Axelrod said.

Access to Documents

It is former Vice President Walter Mondale, not Cheney, who is the likely model for Biden. Mondale, who served under President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, was consulted on almost every appointment and had access to the same documents as the president.

Mondale, 80, met with Biden in August during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where the two men discussed the vice presidency, Mondale said in an interview. Biden has also read a memo that described the role of the vice president in the Carter White House, Mondale said.

``I was invited to every meeting the president had,'' Mondale said. ``I read all the same materials he did, all the top-secret stuff.''

During his tenure, Mondale said he served as an extension of the presidency, traveling to China and the Middle East on diplomatic missions and advising Carter on international and domestic issues.

National Security

Biden, according to Axelrod and other Obama aides, is expected to be an important adviser on Obama's initial national- security and foreign-policy appointments, as well as on policy questions.

Like Obama, Georgia Governor Carter was inexperienced in Washington. He relied heavily on Mondale, who spent 12 years as a U.S. senator from Minnesota, to guide his congressional agenda.

A Biden adviser said the vice president would be a full partner in governing and involved in all the Obama administration's big decisions.

An example of the unique relationship that vice presidents have with their bosses is the regular weekly lunch that has become a tradition since the 1970s, when Gerald Ford served under Richard Nixon.

The lunch, which only includes the president and the vice president, allows the two leaders to discuss a broad range of issues, Mondale said.

Relationships

Biden will also be able to further Obama's agenda with the skills and relationships built up over more than three decades in Washington.

``He's got as many friends among Senate Republicans as he has in our own caucus,'' Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and his party's 2004 presidential nominee, said in an e- mail.

It's also clear Biden was a political asset for Obama during the campaign, providing balance to a ticket headed by a young candidate who sought to be the nation's first black president.

``Biden helped us greatly,'' Axelrod said. Biden's coal- country origins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, allowed Obama to overcome his difficulty in connecting with white working-class voters. Biden has a ``visceral sense of identifying with middle- class, working people,'' Axelrod said.

In an Oct. 15 Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll, 76 percent of registered voters said they believed Biden was prepared to be president, compared with 43 percent who said the same about the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, 44.

The working-class background coupled with his foreign-policy credentials mesh well with Obama's own message of reviving the middle class while ending the war in Iraq.

Richard Moe, Mondale's former chief of staff, said vice presidents are uniquely positioned to give unvarnished advice to their bosses. They are the only other nationally elected official and are able to rise above squabbling Cabinet officers and other senior officials.

``He has only one agenda, that's the president's agenda, or should be,'' Moe said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Christopher Stern in Washington at cstern3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 6, 2008 00:01 EST

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