The New York Times reports that Barack Obama is lagging well behind Clinton in actually carving out a discrete role for his vice-president. As it currently stands, Biden has no particular responsibilities related to White House priorities, no particular portfolio. The line is that he'll be a "trusted counselor," but that's sort of a question of how much Obama trusts his counsel. You do wonder what sort of guarantees Biden extracted in the negotiation process, along the line of Gore's famous insistence on weekly lunches with Clinton.
