Many Americans first encountered Joe Biden during the high-profile hearings on Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Our first emotional reaction was one usually associated with bad dates or awkward break-ups: "Would you please, please stop talking!"
Biden's tendency to run on and loop back, elaborating and correcting himself, insisting that "I just need three more minutes" and then talking for three-quarters of an hour (and inevitably saying something just a little bit off) became such a subject of parody that Biden's greatest accomplishment as a second-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination was not in differentiating himself from his opponents but from his own former self. "Yes" was his single-word answer to a question in the first primary debate about whether he could discipline his tongue. The silence that followed brought relieved laughter to those of us conditioned to wait for the pause and then the outpouring of explanation, reflection, analysis, and counterfactuals.
He did discipline himself, and that achievement alone (it's not easy to change your personality at 65) recommends him as Barack Obama's running mate. But there was something tremendously endearing and admirable about Biden the chatterbox, and this now-repressed trait makes him a strong partner to Obama.
I don't know Biden and he doesn't know me, but I saw a lot of him during the two-year struggle to construct and pass the 1993 crime bill. Like many things associated with Biden, it was an open-ended, rambling process. I was on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley, where I had been involved in crafting a successful amendment to set aside a few hundred million dollars for crime-prevention programs and after-school activities. I found myself -- to my amazement -- wedged among dozens of staffers and members of Congress in the room where House and Senate committee members alone were supposed to resolve the differences between their two bills. In the chaos, I realized what Biden is: a plodder, but a passionate one. He's never the smartest guy in the room. His SAT's probably wouldn't beat Barack Obama's, Al Gore's, or John Kerry's. But, like FDR, he knows it. And so, he works. He learns.
As I listened to Biden pontificate about constitutional law and theories of crime prevention, I slowly realized that he was not just a preening blowhard watching himself in an imaginary mirror. Rather, in a way that was at times reminiscent of the entirely self-taught Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Biden has worked hard to master these issues and wants nothing more to persuade and share his passion for that learning. And so while it required a large commitment of time, a Biden speech defending, say, the Violence Against Women Act, was worth paying attention to, in a way that only a few other senators' speeches (Byrd and the late Paul Wellstone) have ever been.
He didn't always have brilliant solutions -- just as he doesn't have brilliant, never-before-seen solutions on the foreign-policy issues that he waited almost 30 years to take on as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. But the values are liberal and the conclusions are right. More important, when Biden holds a view, he justifies it not by instinct -- the much overrated power of which George W. Bush boasts -- but by immersion in the various viewpoints and relevant facts. There is no better counterpoint to the era of contempt for the "reality-based community" than Biden's evident belief that knowledge and facts, piled up high and sorted through, can support our moral commitments, whether to human rights or women's rights.
In this too he is an important counterpoint to Obama, and not just by virtue of experience. The effort to taint Obama as "elitist" has nothing to do with wealth or upbringing. It has to do with his ease and effortless ascent, which are at once admirable and discomfiting. Karl Rove's characterization of Obama as "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date holding a martini that stands against the wall making snide remarks" was absurd from a socioeconomic perspective but captured the sense of anxiety that many people have with the inequality not of wealth but of talent. The reality of the American dream can be disconcerting.
Biden, though, is the opposite: He is the man who shows his work every step of the way. According to Bill Bradley, when Biden got to the Senate months after the death of his first wife and daughter, he asked a much older colleague who was also a recent widower how he coped. His colleague's simple advice was, "You work." In analyzing Hillary Clinton's appeal to white, working-class voters in June, I noted that her ability to evoke the honor of work itself was one of her greatest rhetorical strengths. "This is me in Scranton," her most memorable primary ad began; she recalled "pinochle and the American dream" in her grandfather's hometown. Scranton is Biden's hometown as well, but it is not just background that makes him the candidate of hard work. It's inherent in his every word -- literally, as he would say, every word. Work is the method by which he built his reputation, and it is how he supports his values.
The traditional contrast in the Senate is between the workhorses and the showhorses. Yet both Biden and Obama, in different ways, defy that easy dichotomy. Both might be called showhorses at first: Biden with his endless talk and Obama with his effortless celebrity. But the chatterbox opens to reveal a diligent, passionate master of issues, and behind the celebrity, it turns out, is the most disciplined CEO of his own campaign we've ever seen. Biden was not my first choice for Obama's running mate (I would have preferred a governor, ideally Sebelius, or a younger senator like Jack Reed of Rhode Island), but seeing them together, and recognizing the magnitude of each one's achievement, it makes perfect sense.
