http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/joe-biden-on-pennsylvania-voting-110408?click=main_srFrom voting day. I knew about the kid with sickle cell anemia but not the flag pin story or Biden's take on gaffes!
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Getting back on his campaign plane -- with 35 members of his family along for the ride -- Biden flies to Richmond, Virginia and takes a quick drive to a polling place at an elementary school. It just rained and the sky is still gray. "Please come inside," one woman says.
"I can't," he says. "They might think I'm voting twice."
He takes a moment with a sick kid and huddles in close with takes a moment with a pair of firefighters, telling them that he's seen their union T-shirts all over the country and really appreciates the support. When a little kid admires his flag pin, he takes it off and bends down to pin it on his jacket. "That's a Secret Service flag," he says. "Wear it with pride, man."
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By mid-afternoon, Biden is feeling so good he comes back to talk to the reporters on the campaign plane for the first time since September 7th. He's full of good-natured jokes, starting with some digs at the reporters who seem to be sleeping off a late night at an Irish bar -- "You guys don't seem to do it like the old guys did" -- and building to a pointed riff on their love for making news out of his verbal stumbles. "I don't think there have been any real gaffes," he says. "I don't think there's anything in your polling data demonstrating any of that stuff you guys love to write about has done anything. I mean, I don't see it."
"Are you relieved that you didn't make any big gaffes?"
"I never make any big, big gaffes, he says. "I mean, you guys love saying that about me, but I tell you what, just look at the numbers. I don't have any problem with what I've said. And nothing I've said I would back off of."
The subject that seems to catch him the most is his old Senate friend, John McCain. "I really am a little disappointed in him," he says. "I can't believe he's not uncomfortable, you know what I mean? I think John just said 'look, I just got to put on these combat boots, man, I got to sludge through this, I got one shot, I got to march through.'"
Growing reflective, he talks about McCain's "shining piece," his personal heroism as a prisoner of war. "I mean, how can you possibly not appreciate the guy's personal courage?" But the thing to remember is that McCain has never been a moderate, he says. McCain is a true believer "in this economic policy which we in somewhat derisive terms call trickle down," and he's also a "go alone guy internationally," which is something Biden finds deeply wrong and also one of the most hubristic hallmarks of the Bush Administration. Continuing, almost as if he's musing on the campaign that's almost over, he says that McCain is a maverick in the sense that "there are certain things that offend his sense of equity, his sense of fairness, his sense of honor," but there isn't an ideological consistency to his thinking. Consider the way his position on torture doesn't seem to carry over to things like habeas corpus. His points of contention with his party are "important but always tangential."
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