Mo Joe

Until you have seen Joe Biden work a firehouse, you ain’t never seen it done. It’s Mantle at the plate, Baryshnikov in Leningrad, Coltrane at the Half Note. There are no simple grin-and-grips, no formalities for the cameras. His jacket is off. His hair is barely there. He’s 69 years old, leaning in, all eye contact, teeth and heart–grabbing, smiling, spilling his guts on the floor.

“Hey, man,” says the Vice President of the United States, holding out a hand to each of the 13 firemen who stand rigid at attention, arms behind their backs in front of a polished red rig in Salem, Ohio, during the third week of May. “You guys underestimate yourselves. You guys underestimate your own impact.” This is what they probably expect, what dozens of politicians would say, about all the extra work firefighters have done since 9/11 even as the Great Recession threatened head counts. But Biden is just getting started.

“I’m alive because of my fire company,” he says after a pause. “My kids are alive.” Then he tells the story again. It’s 1972. He’s just been elected to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old kid. A big rig broadsides the family car. “My wife killed and my daughter. Pray to God. My two sons were saved by my fire company–my fire company. And the Jaws of Life. It’s you guys.” He’s talking quietly now. He’s told the story 1,000 times. But he’s not done.

“I had a cranial aneurysm,” he continues. It’s 1988, just months after he abandoned his first run for the White House. He has to get from Wilmington, Del., to the top brain surgeon at Walter Reed. President Reagan offers to dispatch Marine One, but the altitude could kill him. “My fire company, in the only snowstorm that year, got me down. My fire company.” There’s more, from the summer of 2004. Lightning strikes–the real thing. His wife Jill finds fire spreading in the family home. The local guys have it out in no time at all. The house–pretty much the only possession Biden has to show for four decades in government–is saved. “Every important thing in my life, literally,” says Biden. “Life-and-death stuff.”

The firemen have relaxed; their arms hang at their sides. They get it now. This is what Biden does, what he has been doing for years with voters, with fellow Senators, with foreign leaders. He gets up close and makes them understand that he understands. In Iraq, he knows the names of the faction leaders’ kids; he even took Massoud Barzani’s grandson in the motorcade to see Air Force Two the last time he was there. In the Senate, both Republican Strom Thurmond and Democrat Robert Byrd asked him to give them eulogies. Out on the trail, it’s tangible. Like Bill Clinton before him, he has to win every room. “I’m a fingertip politician,” he tells people.

But this is no longer just about Joe. In northeastern Ohio, at the edge of coal country where they make American Standard bathtubs, John McCain won the county by 7 points in 2008, and Mitt Romney is looking to do much better. Those highly prized middle-class white voters whom pollsters gush over–the ones who have been hurting and frustrated for years, who were always skeptical of the new President with the funny name–this is where they reside, a block or two from the Wing Warehouse and Ricky’s English Pub. So Biden makes his pivot. “The President,” he tells the firemen, “feels as strongly about this as I do.”

The Guy Who Never Retreats

Back at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago, they can’t get enough of it: Biden out on the road, touring the redder parts of purple states with that old-time Democratic religion. Barack Obama lost non-college-educated whites by 18 points in 2008, 58% to 40%, which was bad but also on par with what Democratic candidates John Kerry and Al Gore had done before him. This year, the early polls are starting worse, and if Romney can escape the caricature of the guy who likes “being able to fire people,” Obama could fall further behind. The last ABC News/Washington Post poll has Obama at 34% with non-college-educated white men. A third.

So Biden keeps returning to places like Toledo, Ohio; Davenport, Iowa; and Coconut Creek, Fla.–hubs of what he still calls “the ethnic vote,” which are the Irish, Italians and Polish Catholics and the South Florida Jews. He hits the barbecue joints, hams it up at the pasta houses and works the union halls: 67 campaign rallies and fundraising events so far this cycle. Obama’s political guru David Axelrod offers Biden his highest praise. “He’s been a national figure for more than four decades, but he hasn’t lost that common touch,” Axelrod says. “He’d be a great alderman.”

In truth, there is no one else left doing what Biden does these days: offering himself up, reaching out, sharing the pain like that. Neither Romney nor Obama has this pastoral gene. The President can connect, but he goes the route of the inspiring movement leader, not the hearty pol. No one ever accused him of needing to win every room. Romney’s comfort zone lies somewhere between the boardroom and the Fourth of July parade. He hits Obama for failing the country and then recounts the lyrics of his favorite patriotic songs. “If you count corn as an amber wave of grain, why, you have them right here,” Romney used to say awkwardly in Iowa.

Biden can make both men look like retail amateurs. He speaks a tribal tongue of neighborhood pride, of us vs. them, of Mom and Dad, God rest their souls, the rich and the rest. Tip O’Neill had a saying: “All politics is local.” Biden prefers the municipal analog, “All politics is personal.” “In my neighborhood, where I come from, where these folks come from, everybody knows they’ve got to chip in,” he says at the lunch counter at Hog Father’s Old Fashioned BBQ outside Pittsburgh. “What they don’t like is turning around and finding they are being played for a sucker.”

That’s Biden without the teleprompter, subtly digging at the Republicans. His written remarks hit much harder. He crafts them in weekly phone calls with the top Chicago brass–Stephanie Cutter, Jim Messina and Axelrod. Then he talks the message through with his own staff, telling them it’s got to be more personal, more from the heart. It’s not about a job; it’s about pride. It’s not about layoffs; it’s about dignity. He is an “oral” guy, they all say, which means he doesn’t write anything down. Don’t bring me anything your mother wouldn’t understand, he says. “He puts it in Bidenese,” explains Cutter.

And then he delivers it as if the world could end. “They don’t get us. They don’t get who we are,” he thunders in Steubenville, Ohio. “We’re like everybody else, man,” he cries out in Martins Ferry a day later. “We’re like the rich guys. We dream.” The rich guys are Romney and his pals, and they want the “financialization of every product.” Biden says Romney’s financial background no more prepares him for the White House than a plumber’s background would. “And by the way, there are a lot of awful smart plumbers,” he adds. Sometimes he shouts from the microphone, which cheers the Romney guys in Boston. They can’t wait to string it all together, the crazy-man Biden reel. After all, they point out, Joe is nobody’s savior at the polls. Biden’s national favorability isn’t good. In swing states, it is even worse: 40% favorable and 54% unfavorable. That’s worse than Romney’s national numbers, and Biden, who may have been dragged down by his attack posture, is already far better known.

But Biden never retreats, and he won’t rule out running in 2016 for the top job. He knows the jokes. He hears the Tea Party protesters chanting “Uncle Joe has got to go” behind the Secret Service cordon. When the Onion published a fake story about him polishing his Pontiac Trans Am shirtless in the White House driveway, he came back over the top. “You think I’d drive a Trans Am?” he told Car and Driver. “I have been in my bathing suit in my driveway and not only washed my Goodwood Green 1967 Corvette but also simonized it”–as if the Onion writer had ever heard of simonizing. The $10 Joe Biden beer cozy that reads cheers champ is a best seller on the Obama campaign website, along with the T-shirt that reads HEALTH REFORM STILL A BFD. He’s done Meet the Press 37 times since 2007, but it was only in his last appearance that he started saying “man” like some 1950s hepcat. “These guys wouldn’t even let us put back to work 400,000 teachers, firefighters and cops by a 0.5% tax on the first dollar after the first million you made,” he said of the Republicans in Congress. “C’mon, man.”

The official line among senior aides at the White House is that Biden is performing above expectations. Even the gaffes are not as big a problem as they feared. That gay-marriage fumble–sure, it hurt, made the President look craven, but Biden did it for the right reason. “I’m never going to blame anybody for telling what they believe,” Obama told the women of The View. In private, Biden acts as if he loves it. Speaking to a group of volunteers in North Carolina without a reporter in the room, he admits that the gaffes happen. But then he quotes the old saw. “In Washington, a gaffe is telling the truth,” he says. The troops go wild. That’s Joe, man.

The Guy Who Never Stops Talking

It comes down to this, and everyone knows it: Biden’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. But if you bottle up the effusiveness or eliminate the lack of discipline, you could lose it altogether. “I’m not wearing any funny hats, and I’m not changing my brand,” Biden says he told the President when he took the job. Obama was wary once, annoyed when he came to the Senate that Biden, then a leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, didn’t pay him any mind; on edge when Biden kept fumbling around during the 2008 campaign; and visibly steamed when Biden went off rambling in their early joint White House appearances. But Obama kept his promise. No funny hats, and the Vice President came to whatever meetings he wanted, always got to weigh in. That doesn’t mean the President agreed. Biden was against mandating contraception coverage for Catholic institutions, and he wanted to delay the Osama bin Laden raid. But he knows he was heard.

When governing called for hand holding, for someone to win the room, that’s when the President deployed his man. Biden went to Iraq eight times after the elections in 2008 to teach everyone how to get along. When the crown prince of Bahrain came to town, Obama asked Biden to do the meeting, and he has done the same with China’s likely next President, Xi Jinping. After the Recovery Act passed, Biden got tied to the conference calls because he had the patience to keep hundreds of governors, mayors and county officials out of trouble with several hundred billion dollars in the pipe. And then there is Capitol Hill: Obama still hasn’t won those rooms. But he can send Biden to meet with Mitch McConnell over tax cuts. He can have Biden invite Eric Cantor and his wife Diana to dine with him and Jill at the residence. They are all “good guys” to Biden. Pretty much anyone is.

And it never matters just who shows up in the room. One day in mid-April, back in the Vice President’s suite of offices, Alex Trebek arrives with his Jeopardy! camera crew. Biden is going to be reading the answers for an upcoming episode–another chance for election-year exposure, another opportunity to win the room. “Alex, if I had your hair, I would be President,” Biden says. Then he greets the cameraman. “We are buddies from two minutes ago,” he says. He struggles through the backward grammar of Jeopardy! answers and then offers to show Trebek where he signed his name, next to Dick Cheney’s, in Teddy Roosevelt’s desk.

“I’ve been assigned six states,” Biden tells Trebek when talk turns to the campaign. “Pennsylvania, my home state. Ohio, Iowa, believe it or not, New Hampshire, Florida.” This is off message. His press handlers are clenching their teeth. Officially, in Chicago, there are no assignments: Biden campaigns all over the country. But he goes on. “Now they are talking about assigning me either Virginia, Nevada or North Carolina,” he says. “We started off with Michigan, but we look like we are in pretty good shape in Michigan.”

Trebek and the crew, of course, eat it up. They pose for pictures as Biden explains the Electoral College. “If we win Ohio or Florida, there is no way I think they can pull it together,” he says of the Republicans, another thing he is not supposed to say. And then he has to go, for fundraisers out west. “Anybody want a ride on Air Force Two to California?” Biden offers the crew. They don’t seem to know what to say.

On the way out of the building, Trebek, who knows likability, can’t stop talking about the guy who never stops talking. “He wants to be your friend. He wants you to like him,” the game-show host says of his Vice President. “And there is nothing wrong with that.”