Down-home and laid-back, Joe Biden has been traveling the country saying what few politicians could about their opponents, for better or worse.
Mitt Romney is “etch-a-sketchy,” the vice president said this week.
Joe Biden asks Paul Ryan, “so now you’re Jack Kennedy?” as Ryan said across the board cuts could work and have been done before.
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
Last month, he told a Hispanic audience: “Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his.’’
At a campaign rally Thursday in Las Vegas, he said Paul Ryan and other young Republican leaders in Congress, nicknamed “young guns,” have “their bullets aimed at you.”
Biden has a long history of edgy verbal blurts — in 2007, he described then-Sen. Barack Obama as “articulate” and “clean,” a comment he later said he regretted. But in the week since his blustery debate with GOP vice-presidential nominee Ryan, Biden seems to have found a slightly different niche — a more deliberate delivery of his sometimes-outrageous utterances. He offers these with a smile, relishing the stage, often punctuated by a “Whoa!”
“When Governor Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa!” Biden said on a campaign swing this week. “The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.”
Within the Obama campaign, there is a cautious fear that Biden will go too far. Transcripts of his remarks are not regularly distributed, unlike President Obama’s and the first lady’s. And the vice president’s aides have sometimes tried to steer him away from unscripted encounters with reporters.
But Biden also fills a strategic role for the campaign. With evidence that his middle-class Joe ethos has made him a beloved figure among rank-and-file Democrats, the campaign has regularly dispatched him to working-class communities, union-heavy gatherings and events aimed at Latino voters.
He has been a regular presence in Ohio, perhaps the most critical state on the electoral map. He also has traveled often to Florida and Iowa and just returned from a campaign event with union members in Las Vegas. Overall, Biden has racked up appearances at more than 100 campaign events this year.
Campaign officials have decided to let Joe be Joe. “He has an ability to connect and communicate in a clear and effective way,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in recent interview. “He, like the president, embodies an American success story.”
Republicans say Biden has repeatedly crossed the line of decorum, and political analysts wonder whether he’s gone so far as to become unpresidential.
“Today’s over-the-top rhetoric by Vice President Biden is disappointing, but not all that surprising,’’ Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said after Biden’s “bullets” remark this week. “In the absence of a vision or plan to move the country forward, the vice president is left only with ugly political attacks beneath the dignity of the office he occupies.’’
William A. Galston, an aide to President Bill Clinton who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he’s “never seen a less presidential demeanor from a national candidate.” Biden has twice run for president and has not ruled out a third attempt in 2016.
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