--- title: Let There Be Joe description: His mouth gets ahead of his brain. But Joe Biden's heart is the democrats' killer app canonical: https://time.com/archive/6642393/let-there-be-joe/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-09-10T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-26T16:25:29.534Z article:section: Politics og:title: Let There Be Joe og:description: His mouth gets ahead of his brain. But Joe Biden's heart is the democrats' killer app og:url: https://time.com/archive/6642393/let-there-be-joe/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8084bb27c05ffecf/698a4514cabb1d5778e5244f/360_wbiden_0910.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 360 og:image:height: 203 og:image:alt: 360_wbiden_0910.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Let There Be Joe twitter:description: His mouth gets ahead of his brain. But Joe Biden's heart is the democrats' killer app twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8084bb27c05ffecf/698a4514cabb1d5778e5244f/360_wbiden_0910.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Politics](/section/politics/) # Let There Be Joe > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Newsletters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME publishes seven free email newsletters, written and edited by TIME journalists, reaching more than 1.1 million engaged readers. TIME has reported on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world since 1923, and its newsletters bring that same authority directly to the inbox. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=8275cf89-52b2-4147-a3fa-80efaa78dae1&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) by [David Von Drehle](https://time.com/author/david-von-drehle/) Sep 10, 2012 4:00 AM UTC  Marco Grob for TIME by [David Von Drehle](https://time.com/author/david-von-drehle/) Sep 10, 2012 4:00 AM UTC As attack dogs go, Joe Biden is more chocolate Lab than Doberman pinscher. The Vice President will perform the traditional wet work assigned to presidential running mates, but never with the cold dispatch of his predecessors Dick Cheney and Al Gore. Like a great snuffling puppy, he can’t help getting too enthusiastic. When he was a younger man, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was assigned the unpleasant task of eviscerating Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. His long-winded, half-apologetic, nonquestion questions left witnesses befuddled and had millions of Americans longing for a muzzle. More recently, set loose on Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, he went bounding eagerly up and over the line, adopting his version of a preacher’s drawl to tell an audience that included many African Americans that the GOP wants to “put y’all back in chains.” That one set off a howling of rebuke and fevered talk of dumping Biden from the ticket. Not gonna happen. The Democratic ticket is too finely balanced to tinker with it. Biden’s exuberant too-muchness warms the cool reserve of the man he calls “my boss.” Not to overdo the pet analogies, but there is something catlike about President Obama when he levels that gaze that seems to say, I don’t need your love–it’s your vote I’m after. Biden is Dixieland swing, Obama is Miles Davis. Biden’s a banana split, Obama is grapefruit sorbet. Biden’s a bubble bath, Obama a dip in a Minnesota lake. In the coming campaign for the hearts and minds of America’s remaining undecided voters, the hearts part is Biden’s brief. Desperate to hold on to the ticket’s evaporating 2008 victory margin, Biden campaigns one vote at a time. As the liberal Democrat handpicked by Strom Thurmond to deliver the ancient conservative’s eulogy, he has shown there is no one on earth he won’t work to win over. See him in Martinsville, Va., one recent day, striding toward the door of the Coffee Break Caf. Biden loves diners and firehouses and high school football fields. He has been alerted that stock-car king Glen Wood is inside the Coffee Break; it’s where Wood hangs out when he is not busy running his world-class NASCAR team, Wood Brothers Racing. So Biden bursts through the door with his hair plugs waving and a big smile and booms, “I heard somebody in here won the Daytona!” Wood Brothers took the flag in 2011 with Trevor Bayne behind the wheel. And guess what? Biden wishes he could be Glen Wood. “This guy did what I dreamed of, man,” Biden emotes. “I’d trade being Vice President in a heartbeat for having won Daytona.” He has other wishes too. During an impromptu stop at a high school football practice in South Minneapolis recently, he confided to the boys, “I’m Vice President, and let me tell you, I’d trade it all to go back and play my senior year again.” Granted, the vice presidency is not Biden’s fondest wish. He has run twice for the top job and may run again. But all things considered, he has seemed happy enough to shepherd the Administration’s unprecedented stimulus billions through the gate, and he took obvious joy at helping seal the Democratic Party’s “BFD” of government-supported health insurance for all. Why these reveries, then, about trading it all away? Some politicians try to relate to voters. Biden claims to want to switch places with them. How far this team has come in four years. Obama’s hope-and-change campaign of 2008 was a symphony, not a PowerPoint, and its motto–“Yes we can!”–was more a yearning than a thought. When Biden joined the ticket, he was the seasoned statesman, the venerable Washington hand who reassured swing voters that it was safe to trust the new guy and follow their hearts. Accepting the vice-presidential nomination in Denver, Biden leveraged his long tenure in the U.S. Senate to put the dagger of Brutus between the Republican nominee’s shoulders. “John McCain is my friend. We’ve known each other for three decades. We’ve traveled the world together,” he said. On issue after issue, however, “John McCain was wrong. Barack Obama was right.” This time, in working-class neighborhoods and along rural byways–the pie-and-football country where Biden does his thing–the question is whether Obama feels people’s fear and pain. Does he really believe that “the private sector is doing fine” and that Americans, jobless and in debt, stand most in need of larger-storage batteries, faster trains and a 4.6% hike in the top marginal tax rate? Enter Biden, a heart on the sleeve of the Administration, the plucky boy from scrappy Scranton, Pa., the running back who always heeded his dad’s advice to bounce back up whenever he got knocked down. Biden knows what folks are going through. Just ask him. “Half the time, my nose was in that grass. You know what I mean?” he says at yet another high-school-practice drop-by. Does he go too far sometimes? Did his ma call him Joey? Of course he goes too far. Along with the familiar Washington mix of neediness and overconfidence, Biden’s brain is wired for more than the usual amount of goofiness. Picture the Vice President of the United States telling a bunch of schoolboys, “When you’re playing for the state title, you’ve got to invite me! Don’t pretend you don’t know me.” Or feigning delight when a woman at a diner threatens to invite him to visit the Walmart where she works. “I’m like a poor relative. I show up if I’m invited,” he warns. A woman at a firehouse tells him they share a distant relative, and–surprise!–“If I got the choice of being related to one of you,” Biden answers, well, she would be “the one I would pick.” And by going too far, sometimes he becomes reckless, as he did when he promised at one unscheduled stop, “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.” Evidently he had forgotten that his boss offered significant changes to Social Security last year in hopes of getting Republicans to strike a deal on spending and taxes. The heart doesn’t trifle with consistency. There is an old saw in politics about learning to fake sincerity, but Biden has been overdoing it for so long that you have to conclude he’s for real. After all, he has been running for federal office since Paul Ryan was in diapers. That’s 40 years of putting himself out there, raw and unscripted, as he showed during a stop at a memorial to victims of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. Asked to reflect, he didn’t offer canned remarks on violence or guns or public safety. The scene reminded him, he said, of the loss of his wife and daughter in a 1972 car wreck. “You know, I think of those kids, but I also think of their parents. No child should predecease their parents. “I remember what it’s like–“ Pause. “It brings back–“ Pause. “It brings back memories … that call, out of the blue.” Once more, with feeling. That could be Joe Biden’s bumper sticker. Always with feeling, which is just what Obama needs this year. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642393/let-there-be-joe/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642393/let-there-be-joe/"},"headline":"Let There Be Joe","datePublished":"2012-09-10T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:25:29.534Z","description":"His mouth gets ahead of his brain. 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