Biden tells Democrats to keep the faith

The president is in trouble. The party is in disarray. It's time for Democratic mandarins to convene at the Mandarin.

After the party's recent loss in a Senate special election in Massachusetts, polls show that Americans think Democrats have lost touch with the middle class. Leaders of the Democratic National Committee converged on Washington on Tuesday to discuss this problem -- at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel ($495 to $1,900 a night) near the Tidal Basin. The DNC leaders gathered in a ballroom one floor beneath CityZen ($110 for the chef's tasting menu, with a $40 supplement for risotto with shaved white truffle from Alba) and summoned a mandarin's mandarin, Vice President Biden, for advice.

"The reports of our demise are premature," Biden told the assembled members of the Democrats' national finance committee and national advisory board. "Take a deep breath. Let's put this in perspective."

Okay, let's. After the Democrats' loss of a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, their health-care legislation is in tatters and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are openly defying President Obama. Vulnerable Democrats continue to retire rather than face reelection, and Beau Biden, the vice president's own son, decided he'd rather not lend his good name to the Democratic ballot in November as a Senate candidate from Delaware.

"Yeah, we took a hit," Biden went on. But, looking on the bright side, he added: "I'm not so sure what a blessing 60 votes was." The audience laughed at this apparent humor. "Not a joke," he responded. "I mean it sincerely."

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Perhaps it was fear of such a headline that caused the White House to go to great lengths to keep the vice president under wraps as he addressed the party's quarterly meeting. Biden, known for his loose lips, caused enough of a fuss when a Delaware paper reported Sunday that he had said his son did not want to run for the Senate. It turned out to have been a misquote, but Biden's idle chatter drew more attention to Beau's announcement the next day that he wasn't running -- a big embarrassment for the Democrats.

The vice president's office didn't allow any TV cameras to tape Biden's speech Tuesday. It didn't allow Associated Press or Reuters journalists to attend. In fact, Biden aides included only one reporter, from the left-leaning Talking Points Memo news Web site.

Though the ballroom had a capacity of 400 and there were only 100 mandarins on hand, a Biden spokesman said he was following the prior practice of admitting one "pool" reporter to fundraising events -- an argument that would have worked better if the event had been a fundraiser. White House stenographers transcribed the speech, but as of late Tuesday night, the White House hadn't released a transcript.

Still, the irrepressible veep's words eventually got out. To her credit, the Talking Points Memo reporter, Christina Bellantoni, wrote a lengthy account for colleagues and quoted extensively from Biden's remarks. She observed that he had been given a teleprompter but, in usual fashion, took frequent departures from the script. She noted that he referred to the recent economic turmoil as "this great depression" before downgrading that to a recession. She observed that he avoided mention of his son's decision not to bet on the Democrats this fall. She provided an audio recording of the speech that featured Biden, competing with a baby's burbles, using the word "god-awful" and the phrases "bless me, Father" and "the horse can't carry that sleigh."

"Look, we understand that people are frustrated," Biden told the mandarins. "If the Lord Almighty were president, why would they not be frustrated?"

Then again, the Lord Almighty probably would have commanded more party loyalty on Capitol Hill than the current White House incumbent. On Saturday, Obama called on the Senate to pass legislation to create a debt commission; on Tuesday, at the very moment Biden addressed the DNC, 23 Senate Democrats helped to defeat the debt commission.

A CNN poll released Tuesday found that 44 percent of Americans think Obama has accomplished less than they expected, compared with only 12 percent who thought he did more than anticipated. By more than 2 to 1, they also thought Obama had paid more attention to the problems of banks than to the problems of the middle class.

Biden went to battle against that perception with a long list of accomplishments, from the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation to the stimulus plan, "an incredibly well-run, well-executed program." He predicted without qualification that "you're going to see, come the spring, net increase in jobs every month."

"So, folks," Biden told the mandarins, "I ask you only one thing: Keep the faith, keep the faith. There is no reason -- there is no reason -- for us to be down."

Well, maybe one reason. Biden told the DNC officials that he plans to be "on the air a lot this week." Uh-oh. For Biden aides trying to keep the boss out of trouble, it may be time to take a deep breath.