US Election: Democrats Get Ready to Set Stage for Biden

Joe Biden, who is set to make his debut as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in Denver tomorrow night, today reflected the high expectations generated by the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency, describing the election as the most important the Democrats have faced since the 1930s.

The normally verbose - and gaffe-prone - senator from Delaware has been unusually quiet since Barack Obama named him on Saturday as his running mate.

The silence is partly because of a warning from Obama's campaign team to be more disciplined. Yesterday, stopping outside Boney's Smokehouse barbecue stand in the center of Denver, he refused to be drawn by reporters' questions, an almost unheard of occurrence for Biden.

But speaking to delegates from his home state this morning, he acknowledged the expectation raised about an Obama administration, drawing a parallel with the presidency that delivered the New Deal.

He called the election "the most incredible opportunity any president and vice-president will have since Franklin Roosevelt".

He will have a chance to expand on that as the main speaker at the convention tomorrow night, a role made more difficult than usual by having to follow the potentially headline-grabbing former president, Bill Clinton.

Biden, veteran chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, is hoping to eclipse the former president by outlining a radical shift in US foreign policy to repair what he regards as the wreckage of the Bush administration.

Crucial to that will be his role in the White House. There is a tendency to downplay the vice-presidency, both during a campaign and in the subsequent administration. But Robert Dallek, professor of history at Boston university and the pre-eminent scholar on US presidents, said today that while vice-presidents never used to be important, "that all changed in 1960 when Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate".

The subsequent trend culminated in Cheney's accumulation of immense power.

Dallek thought that the degree of power attained by Cheney "will make the next president cautious about giving the vice-president too much authority".

But others at the convention argued that it will not be easy to rein Biden in, given he is much more experienced in foreign policy than Obama and that, anyway, there appeared to be little sign from the Obama camp that it necessarily wanted to roll back the centralization of national security policy within the vice-president's office.

Biden spent the weekend through until Sunday morning with Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, in Delaware before traveling to Denver by train.

He also met his new security team for a briefing on the 24-hour surveillance that comes with the job.

In between, he has been working on tomorrow night's speech. As well as setting out foreign policy for a new administration, he has been tasked with attacking the Republican candidate, John McCain.

There has been a tendency at the conference so far to avoid attack politics but that does not apply to Biden, who unlike Obama, is a scrapper, able to deliver what a Democratic adviser described as "zingers" against McCain.

Another asset on the campaign trail is that Biden, aged 65, from a Catholic working-class background in Scranton, Pennsylvania, might make a better job than Obama of connecting with white working-class males in the key battlefield states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.

While the appointment of Biden has been generally well-received at the conference, there are skeptics.

Bloggers on liberal web sites point out that, for all the claims about this ability to connect with working-class voters, he only won a miserable 638 votes in the New Hampshire primary in January, forcing him to pull out.

Among the skeptics is William Galston, a former Bill Clinton adviser and now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who said, in a commentary sent out to reporters, that previous presidents had chosen running mates who could help swing their home states.

"One thing is clear: Biden does nothing to brighten Obama's prospects in the electoral college," he wrote. If Obama fails to win the November election, he predicted "an orgy of second-guessing" over whether he could have chosen someone who might have delivered a crucial state.

Obama chose Biden not primarily for his campaigning skills but with a view to government. Dallek said Biden was a good choice, especially against the background of security scares.

"If for some reason Obama is incapacitated - or, perish the thought, dies in office - people know he would be a competent president," Dallek said.

Steve Clemons, a director the Washington-based New America Foundation, who is close to the Democratic foreign policy establishment and who was among the first to tip Biden for the vice-presidential slot, is at the convention and is among those who argue that Biden's exercise of power in the White House would be similar to that of Cheney's.

While he acknowledged that Obama as president might seek to rein in the vice-president, he said: "The office of vice-president has changed forever. The office has explicit legal powers now. Maybe some will be rolled back but they can't be rolled back easily. The template of being a big player in foreign affairs is established."

The difference is that while Cheney used that accumulated power to push right-wing ideological positions, Biden would seek to exercise it in pursuit of liberal ones. Like Obama, he is committed to an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, a war that he now regrets having voted for, favors direct negotiations with Iran, wants to encourage a more aggressive approach by the Pakistan government towards the Taliban and al-Qaida elements inside its borders, and more pressure on the Sudanese government over Darfur.

In recent years, he has displayed his liberal background by helping to block the long-term appointment of the neo-conservative, John Bolton, to the United Nations and to force a softening the Bush administration's position towards Iran during a bout of sabre-rattling last year.

Thomas Mann, another Brookings politics specialist, who is in Denver, said he thought Biden was a good choice but would not be as powerful as Cheney.

"All vice-presidents since (Walter) Mondale (vice-president from 1977-81) have played a more important role than had historically been the case. I look for Biden to play a role more like (Al) Gore to Clinton," Mann said.

Jim Webb, the Virginia senator who was on the shortlist for the vice-presidency slot, saw Biden as having an important role because of his long experience. "He's a rudder... He has a handle on the bureaucracy and knows how to get things done," Webb said.