"Joe Biden in winter is still basically a happy warrior, but the past couple years have been a struggle for both relevance and leverage—a fight largely hidden from public view, between the presidential dreams he can’t quite relinquish and the shrinking parameters of a job he described to me as derivative, borrowed and “totally reflective of the president’s power.”
Almost all White House partnerships deteriorate in the end, undone by diverging politics, festering policy disputes—or simply human fatigue amid the strains of trying to turn what is inevitably a shotgun marriage into a love match. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were barely on speaking terms by the time the disputed 2000 election came around, with Gore furious at Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and Clinton appalled at Gore’s lame political skills. Even the celebrated team of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came unraveled by the final few years, as Bush abandoned the hawkish policies of his veep and turned to a more conciliatory set of advisers.
How does this one end?
When we talk, Biden tells me he’ll respond by embracing “my guy” Obama even harder, but it’s clear he could use his guy to reciprocate: Over the past year, Harry Reid, the ornery Senate majority leader, has elbowed Biden out of the budget process he dominated not so long ago, and the White House seems OK with that. There was even the report last fall, over-torqued but nonetheless embarrassing, that Obama’s team had mused about booting Biden off the 2012 ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton. As if that wasn’t bad enough, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has taken it as his own personal mission to dismantle Biden’s elder statesman status, declaring in his recent memoir that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/joe-biden-profile-103667.html?hp=t1#.Uw9sqPl5PAw
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