Joe Adams

Every nominee for Vice President gets a quick re-evaluation by the national media.

It’s important work, because the VP can become The Man in a heartbeat. Or (as we’ve seen in this decade) he can become The Man anyway.

Since I first voted, in 1976, I have seen many of these re-evaluations. Most of these men (and one woman) held up well. Some — Ferrarro, Quayle — completely failed the test.

Politics is a field that brings out your faults and magnifies them. It seldom happens that the re-evaluation brings out hidden strengths, and the candidate grows before our eyes. George H.W. Bush and Al Gore both did this.

So has Joe Biden.

I didn’t know he was the poorest U.S. Senator, in terms of wealth. Remember, this guy has been in office 35 years. The Senate pays pretty well. In all that time he has built one grand house, in Wilmington, Delaware, saving the cost of a Capitol abode and commuting by train instead. I thought he was the "Senator from MBNA," but apparently he didn’t take much of their money, because you can’t find it on him.

When I have thought of Joe Biden over the years (and that was seldom) I’ve seen an ambitious blowhard who was great mainly in his own eyes. I didn’t see anything of the Founding Fathers in him at all.

Until this weekend, when I suddenly saw John Adams.

Maybe this was down to the Tom Hanks-produced seven-part mini-series starring Paul Giamatti. The screen version threw out most of David McCullough’s worshipful book, which painted the man as he saw himself, and gave us the real Adams. Smart, tough, vainglorious. A fighter who lived simply deliberately and was rewarded, in the end, by a 26-year retirement — something of a record at the time.

The screenplay focused on key incidents. In a way — given how we now insist on judging American soldiers and contractors in Iraq ourselves — the first episode is most telling. In it, Adams defends the soldiers who fired on the crowd in the Boston Massacre. It’s the Penge Bungalow murders, alone and without a leader, only for a principled reason. Adams wanted to prove to America’s British overlords that Americans could dispense impartial justice.

It was when the British ignored his success that Adams turned toward independence. And forced the issue. That the Continental Congress produced the Declaration is no one’s doing more than Adams’. Don’t ever forget that.

Biden’s Penge Bungalow was the passage of the original FISA law, back in 1978. It was the Bush Administration’s ignoring of this law that most got his Irish up, turning him into an attack dog against untrammeled executive power. Bet you didn’t know that.

Biden became the Washington equivalent of an Old Bailey hack, rising through the seniority ranks to become chair of the Judiciary Committee, where he fought Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Yes, he did it inartfully. He was obnoxious and disliked. But he beat Bork, and almost beat Thomas, and how much different might history have gone had he lost the first or won the second. At a minimum he clearly defined the line between "conservative justice" and liberal, which has become the primary fault line in American politics ever since.

I think Biden was on the right side.

Then he had a second career, choosing Foreign Relations over the Judiciary Committee, where he was forced to stand as Ranking Minority while the Republican Congress gave the Bush Administration enough rope to hang everybody.

In the Hanks teleplay of McCullough’s book it’s easy to see why John Adams was disliked. He let himself be led astray by Hamilton’s men, signing the Alien and Sedition Acts. He was completely ineffectual in Europe, except as an example of that most insufferable archetype the American Idealist. Yet the calm, great man at the center of the story chose Adams, despite his faults, and in the full judgement of history he served well. He kept us out of war near our birth when any other President would have failed, perhaps strangling the country in its crib.

As Joe Biden has served well. He’s obnoxious and disliked that cannot be denied. He is filled with his own self-regard. He talks too much, and is a one-man gaffe machine. But it’s never done with malice, he’s as honest as the day is long, he is in fact usually the smartest guy in the room. He’s nothing like Obama but then again no one on Earth is like Obama. You can’t clone him as Gore cloned Clinton.

If I could compare Biden to any past Vice Presidential choice it would probably be John Nance Garner. Garner was a 30-year House veteran when Roosevelt tapped him, mainly to win his own nomination, and later called the Vice Presidency worth less "than a bucket of warm spit." The Vice Presidency has changed since then. Only Dan Quayle, among recent Vice Presidents, has been completely worthless, and we now know Quayle was just a placeholder for the man Bush Sr. really wanted, his own son. (We should have listened.)