Washington insider talks a good game

Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 22:07

WHILE other potential vice-presidential nominees were appearing on the Sunday talk shows last weekend, Senator Joe Biden was spending time in Tbilisi, Georgia, meeting the country's embattled president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Biden's visit highlighted his standing as an expert on foreign policy – he is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – who is known and respected around the world. But it also emphasised his status as a Washington insider at a time when Americans say they are hungering for change.

Biden's strengths and weaknesses as a running mate are glaringly obvious and in many cases overlap. Aged 65, he would bring heft, knowledge and nearly four decades of experience in Washington to a ticket headed by a relative political newcomer. But that experience would undercut Barack Obama's image as an agent of change.

Biden is among the best-informed politicians on international affairs, a gap in Obama's resum. But Biden's broad knowledge and debating acumen feeds his biggest flaw: a verbosity and love of his own voice that drive many, including, by some accounts, Obama, nuts.

Biden supported the 2002 Iraq war resolution and thus is at odds with Obama, who opposed the war from the start and has made his judgment on the question a centrepiece of his campaign. But Biden tempered his support for the conflict by saying it should be limited to ending Iraq's weapons programmes, and has been a persistent critic of the war's conduct.

Last year, he said giving the Bush administration the authority to wage war was a mistake. "I regret my vote," he said. "The president did not level with us."

Biden's first bid for the presidency, beginning in 1987, failed after he was caught stealing passages from a speech by Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party in Britain. His 2008 campaign never really got off the ground, little noticed in a field of well-financed candidates.

Biden is a Roman Catholic who supports abortion rights. He grew up in a working-class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which helped him with voters that Obama had trouble attracting in the primaries.

Friends and supporters of Biden say he would be an asset if he can subordinate himself to a rookie senator nearly two decades younger.

Richard C Holbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations and a potential secretary of state in a Democratic administration. said: "He would bring to any administration a tremendous credibility and talent."