State of the Union address
I started drafting this blog entry last week, and now it is high time I published it. Perhaps I am doing this just to be different, since right after the speech, of course everyone was talking about it. Or maybe I am lazy and like to procrastinate. But also I think the real impact of a speech takes time to settle out.
What has stuck with me about that speech is actually what I learned about Joe Biden's role in the administration. The role of the Vice President is constitutionally ill defined, and there are a variety of ways it can be performed. Many films and shows about the White House treat the office of the Vice President as some inconsequential distraction to the main show of the President, but that is not the way I have experienced it as an American the last 20 years or so. I think that is a relic of the Dan Quail years, but since the Clinton/Gore administration, an appreciation for the capacity of the Office of the Vice President to be an integral part of the governance of the United States has surely increased. I suspect even in the time of the Reagan/Bush administration, an awful lot of important work was being done through the Vice President's office. The U.S. is, afterall, a very big and complex country, and it behooves all of us to have two reliable individuals putting their heads together about how best to execute the will of the people.
Most often the distinction between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President has been drawn along the lines of domestic policy versus foreign policy; the Vice President afterall is not the commander in chief of the military and does not have an assigned role in that hierarchy. But certainly Dick Cheney was heavily involved in military operation planning and execution (some claim that really George Bush was more of the Vice President in that administration anyhow). There is really no set one way to divide up the power between those two offices. In the Clinton/Gore administration, everyone always talked about them being a team, jointly consulting on most everything, and indeed, after the Bush/Quail debacle, having a ticket with two obvious equals was a real stroke of brilliance on the part of the Democrats in 1992.
So it was intriguing when Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, in terms of what sort of dynamic the two of them would work out. Some suggested it would be like Bush/Cheney, where Biden would actually be pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes; others suggested Biden was just put on the ticket for the sake of the senior vote and would have no real role in the administration. But my impression from the State of the Union was not like that at all. I had the impression that Obama and Biden are working on a Clinton/Gore type arrangement, where tasks are divided but not separated, where joint meetings keep their efforts coordinated, and where the Vice President has sufficient power and capability to make real policy changes. Granted this seems to be more on the domestic front than the foreign policy front, but that may just be for now, and may also be for appearances sake, since Joe Biden has considerable foreign policy experience. But there is afterall a real dynamo at the State Department to help the President out in that regard.
What has stuck with me about that speech is actually what I learned about Joe Biden's role in the administration. The role of the Vice President is constitutionally ill defined, and there are a variety of ways it can be performed. Many films and shows about the White House treat the office of the Vice President as some inconsequential distraction to the main show of the President, but that is not the way I have experienced it as an American the last 20 years or so. I think that is a relic of the Dan Quail years, but since the Clinton/Gore administration, an appreciation for the capacity of the Office of the Vice President to be an integral part of the governance of the United States has surely increased. I suspect even in the time of the Reagan/Bush administration, an awful lot of important work was being done through the Vice President's office. The U.S. is, afterall, a very big and complex country, and it behooves all of us to have two reliable individuals putting their heads together about how best to execute the will of the people.
Most often the distinction between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President has been drawn along the lines of domestic policy versus foreign policy; the Vice President afterall is not the commander in chief of the military and does not have an assigned role in that hierarchy. But certainly Dick Cheney was heavily involved in military operation planning and execution (some claim that really George Bush was more of the Vice President in that administration anyhow). There is really no set one way to divide up the power between those two offices. In the Clinton/Gore administration, everyone always talked about them being a team, jointly consulting on most everything, and indeed, after the Bush/Quail debacle, having a ticket with two obvious equals was a real stroke of brilliance on the part of the Democrats in 1992.
So it was intriguing when Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, in terms of what sort of dynamic the two of them would work out. Some suggested it would be like Bush/Cheney, where Biden would actually be pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes; others suggested Biden was just put on the ticket for the sake of the senior vote and would have no real role in the administration. But my impression from the State of the Union was not like that at all. I had the impression that Obama and Biden are working on a Clinton/Gore type arrangement, where tasks are divided but not separated, where joint meetings keep their efforts coordinated, and where the Vice President has sufficient power and capability to make real policy changes. Granted this seems to be more on the domestic front than the foreign policy front, but that may just be for now, and may also be for appearances sake, since Joe Biden has considerable foreign policy experience. But there is afterall a real dynamo at the State Department to help the President out in that regard.
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