Mission Impossible: Managing Joe Biden

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Politico:

BLACKSBURG, Va. — The most emotionally powerful minute of Joe Biden’s two-day swing through rural Virginia almost didn’t happen.

After the vice president paid a solemn visit Wednesday to the memorial honoring the victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting here, reporters asked him about his feelings upon seeing the site.

As Biden began to answer, his aides intervened, yelling “Let’s go,” and trying to shoo reporters back to the motorcade.

(PHOTOS: Joe Biden over the years)

Only when it became clear that the vice president wanted to express himself did his entourage stop interrupting to let the candidate speak.

When he did, Biden recalled his own family tragedy — losing his young wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident — and paused repeatedly to keep his composure.

It was the side of Biden — comfortable with his emotions, and with a gift for human connection — that makes him appealing to many voters. And the moment never would’ve taken place if he had not effectively overruled his would-be handlers.

It was a vivid illustration of a phenomenon that pervades the 2012 campaign: The consuming effort by operatives to stamp the spontaneity and life out of modern politics.

(Also on POLITICO: Ryan: Biden is ‘desperate’)

Of course, Biden’s two-day swing through small-town Virginia also offered a perfect example of why this brand of control-freak politics has emerged. His unrehearsed comment to a mixed-race audience in Danville that the Republicans and their Wall Street allies want to put people “back in chains” made national news as an example of rhetorical excess.

In an era of Twitter and saturation news coverage — when one stray remark can upend a day’s news cycle and campaigns struggle to shape their preferred message — politicians and their aides are increasingly intent on restricting the media’s interaction with candidates. Barack Obama or Mitt Romney both shun the sort of freewheeling news conferences that used to be a staple of campaigns. And when reporters do seek to engage the candidates, the staff minders attempt to shut it down with ham-handed aggressiveness.

All candidates live with the contradiction — a media culture that implores politicians to seem authentic but is ready to punish them when they really are — but the challenge is especially exquisite in Biden’s case.

(Also on POLITICO: Axelrod: 'Chains' not racial comment)

He is an irrepressible, garrulous and emotive politician, who’s flourished and fumbled through 40 years in national office by practicing politics the old-fashioned way — from the gut and without much script. He’s as fine a one-on-one politician of any officeholder of his generation, a talent especially prized because it is not a particular gift of Obama’s.

But his penchant for off-message moments regularly sends aides in the West Wing and at Chicago reelection headquarters into orbit.

________

 

I say let him keep shooting his mouth off.

[Draggingtree]

Politico:

BLACKSBURG, Va. — The most emotionally powerful minute of Joe Biden’s two-day swing through rural Virginia almost didn’t happen.

After the vice president paid a solemn visit Wednesday to the memorial honoring the victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting here, reporters asked him about his feelings upon seeing the site.

As Biden began to answer, his aides intervened, yelling “Let’s go,” and trying to shoo reporters back to the motorcade.

(PHOTOS: Joe Biden over the years)

Only when it became clear that the vice president wanted to express himself did his entourage stop interrupting to let the candidate speak.

When he did, Biden recalled his own family tragedy — losing his young wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident — and paused repeatedly to keep his composure.

It was the side of Biden — comfortable with his emotions, and with a gift for human connection — that makes him appealing to many voters. And the moment never would’ve taken place if he had not effectively overruled his would-be handlers.

It was a vivid illustration of a phenomenon that pervades the 2012 campaign: The consuming effort by operatives to stamp the spontaneity and life out of modern politics.

(Also on POLITICO: Ryan: Biden is ‘desperate’)

Of course, Biden’s two-day swing through small-town Virginia also offered a perfect example of why this brand of control-freak politics has emerged. His unrehearsed comment to a mixed-race audience in Danville that the Republicans and their Wall Street allies want to put people “back in chains” made national news as an example of rhetorical excess.

In an era of Twitter and saturation news coverage — when one stray remark can upend a day’s news cycle and campaigns struggle to shape their preferred message — politicians and their aides are increasingly intent on restricting the media’s interaction with candidates. Barack Obama or Mitt Romney both shun the sort of freewheeling news conferences that used to be a staple of campaigns. And when reporters do seek to engage the candidates, the staff minders attempt to shut it down with ham-handed aggressiveness.

All candidates live with the contradiction — a media culture that implores politicians to seem authentic but is ready to punish them when they really are — but the challenge is especially exquisite in Biden’s case.

(Also on POLITICO: Axelrod: 'Chains' not racial comment)

He is an irrepressible, garrulous and emotive politician, who’s flourished and fumbled through 40 years in national office by practicing politics the old-fashioned way — from the gut and without much script. He’s as fine a one-on-one politician of any officeholder of his generation, a talent especially prized because it is not a particular gift of Obama’s.

But his penchant for off-message moments regularly sends aides in the West Wing and at Chicago reelection headquarters into orbit.

________

 

I say let him keep shooting his mouth off.

 

Rex Murphy: In the battle of the vice-presidents, Ryan wins by a knockout

 

 

Rex Murphy | Aug 18, 2012 12:10 AM ET | Last Updated: Aug 18, 2012 12:45 AM ET

Lyndon Johnson was, prior to John Kennedy’s assassination, just a cipher of a vice-president. The Kennedys needed Texas and thought Johnson could deliver it. Other than that he was a jug-eared embarrassment to their more stylish clan.

Brutal events rescued Johnson from the forgotten valley of VP. Kennedy’s assassination brought him into his own, and a giant ego in tandem with great legislative gifts made Johnson — one termer though he was — a president of note. Though he had suffered as vice-president, Johnson was not one to mitigate the suffering of others. It was Johnson’s sour mouth we owe this cruel, brilliant, mildly vulgar putdown of Gerald Ford: “Gerry Ford couldn’t pour piss out of a cowboy boot if the instructions were written on the heel.”

That’s as crisp, caustic and cruel as it gets, and unfair to Ford, who read more

 

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/18/rex-murphy-in-the-battle-of-the-vice-presidents-ryan-wins-by-a-knockout/