Biden Outlines Plans to Do More With Less Power.

[elleng]

Source: NYTimes

WASHINGTON — He was in the Senate for 36 years and visited the White House under seven presidents. But Joseph R. Biden Jr. has never seen the inside of the vice president’s office in the West Wing. “I never thought a lot about the vice presidency,” he said, “until I was asked to go on the ticket.”

Perhaps not, but Mr. Biden certainly has been doing a lot of thinking about it in the last 10 weeks as he prepares to assume the nation’s second-highest position. A man who does not even know what the office looks like says he plans to reinvent the vice presidency on the theory that the man now occupying it distorted it out of all proportion.

While most incoming vice presidents arrive eager to expand the influence of the office, Mr. Biden faces the unusual conundrum of figuring out how to scale it back. He wants to “restore the balance,” as he put it, after the unprecedented assertion of authority by Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet at the same time, Mr. Biden hardly wants to return to the days when the vice president was neither seen nor heard.' >>>



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/us/politics/15biden.html?hp

[Judi Lynn]

1. Thanks for posting the Biden article, elleg. We can surely appreciate the difference from the beast

who has lurked there since 2001. He'll be a breath of VERY clean fresh air.

[elleng]

2. You are welcome, Judi Lynn.

He certainly will be a breath of fresh air. As he said,

“The only value of power is the effect, the efficacy of its use."