Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview

Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview
The vice president on guns, global warming and why he's "the last guy in the room" on every decision Obama

Vice President Joe Biden

Mark Seliger

By Douglas Brinkley
May 9, 2013 1:50 PM ET


There is a keen Kennedy-like vigor to Joe Biden that overwhelms any room. As was once said of Theodore Roosevelt, he, too, wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Unlike President Obama, who speaks in interviews with Hemingway-esque sparseness, Biden rambles like Thomas Wolfe, painting a robust picture of an ever-changing America where coal miners will soon be working in clean-tech jobs, gun-safety laws will be tougher and China will be reined in by the White House from poisoning the planet with megatons of choking pollutants.

Never before have a president and vice president been as close personally and professionally as Barack Obama and Joe Biden – just think about the past 80 years. FDR switched out VPs with the regularity of a farmer rotating his crops. Harry Truman had little use for the lightweight Alben Barkley. Dwight Eisenhower never really trusted Richard Nixon. Historian Robert Caro just published an award-winning 736-page biography – The Passage of Power – that essentially chronicles JFK's deep aversion for LBJ. Nixon's selection of the pugilist Spiro Agnew in 1968 as his vice president blew up in his face a few years later: A volcanic eruption of ethics charges were levied against Agnew, and he was forced to resign. Gerald Ford and his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, never quite jelled. Ford, in fact, asked Bob Dole to run as the VP candidate in 1976 – an awful slap to Rockefeller. Although it's true that Jimmy Carter was extraordinarily close to Walter Mondale, their relationship lacked the two-term gravitas of Obama and Biden's ironclad bond. Ronald Reagan wasn't particularly intimate with George H.W. Bush; their wives often feuded. And when Bush became president, he didn't take Dan Quayle very seriously. (Nor did the country.)

Of course, Al Gore and Dick Cheney were formidable presences in the past two White Houses. But by the time both of those men left Washington, their relationships with their bosses were strained. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were clearly chummy, tossing footballs together on the trail as "Don't Stop," by Fleetwood Mac, blasted out of the bus speakers. But once the Monica Lewinsky scandal started unraveling, Gore backed away from a tainted Clinton. Cheney was seen as the puppet master of the Bush White House, the mastermind of the Iraq War. But by the end of Bush's second term, the two men had grown estranged.

As Biden tells it, these days he and the president see eye to eye on all policy issues. Only their nuances are slightly different. It's not far-fetched to think that Biden will run for president in 2016 on Obama's coattails. This notion surprises many Republicans, who feel Obama is foundering and that Biden, who will be 74 at the beginning of the next presidential term, is too old. But Biden is smart to stay close to Obama, whose public-approval rating hovers just below 50 percent (a number that rises to around 75 percent among registered Democrats). Assuming Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, she will sell herself as a successor to her husband, harkening back to the economic heyday of the 1990s. By contrast, if Biden gets into the race, it will be as an Obama Democrat promising to expand on the record of the last two terms.

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