Joe Biden

TAMARAC, Fla. -- If there's one thing Vice President Joe Biden does more conspicuously here than in other states, it's to play the role as chief validator for his running mate. Before senior-heavy audiences in southern Florida on Friday, he fulfilled that role in two ways, buttressing the Obama campaign's case against the Republicans on entitlement programs, and offering a firm testimonial for the president when it comes to his stewardship of the U.S. relationship with Israel. The 69-year-old former senator waxed at greater length here about his decades-long career in public service, in part to make that point.

If President Obama seemed as if he'd rather be getting his teeth drilled than debate Mitt Romney last week, Vice President Joe Biden spent most of his 90-minute televised showdown with Paul D. Ryan on Thursday night looking like he was having the time of his life. Certainly the format - the two men next to each other at a table facing moderator Martha Raddatz and the audience - played to Biden's experience and jocular ease. Whereas Ryan sat schoolboy straight or hunched tensely in concentration, Biden leaned back, turned this way and that, and played directly to the cameras.

Is Joe Biden married to a physician? You might have gotten that impression while watching television coverage of the inauguration. “Dr.” Jill Biden's doctorate is in education, yet word obviously has been sent out from the White House that she should be accorded the honorific that appears on her White House biography . The vice president's wife thus joins  the select group of non-medicos  who are routinely referred to as “Dr.” in...

DANVILLE, Ky. - Vice President Joe Biden was either a happy warrior or a smirking boor, but his demeanor in the vice presidential debate with Rep. Paul D. Ryan dominated talk among campaign surrogates afterward as Democrats expressed glee over Biden's irreverent performance and Republicans  expressed a combination of shock and puzzlement. “Biden was a happy warrior tonight,” Obama-Biden campaign manager Jim Messina said over and over in the “spin alley” that has become a fixture of political debates.

Since it became clear that Mitt Romney would win the GOP nomination, the Obama campaign has been eager to portray the former Massachusetts governor as the committed conservative he presented himself as in the primaries. But Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday portrayed Romney as weak and waffling when it comes to foreign policy, an issue on which Democrats feel they have the advantage in the fall campaign. Biden contrasted what he characterized as Romney's uncertainty with President Obama's record of making "hard calls with strength and steadiness," with no better example than ordering the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, a successful mission that is nearing its one-year anniversary.

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio - About the last thing Barack Obama's advisors expected when Joe Biden joined the ticket was to see him develop a kitsch public persona - an odd blend of affable everyman and the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World. " But they've been quick to take advantage. At the Obama for America campaign store, an online visitor can buy "Morning Joe" coffee mugs (featuring the grinning face of a man who rarely lacks energy), "BFD" T-shirts (memorializing one of the vice president's more famous off-color lines)

Joe Biden is what you would call a close talker. He gets right in your face, almost nose to nose. This unnerves those with personal-space issues, but that is clearly not the case for hundreds of people who have pushed their way to the rope line outside a pro football shrine to shake the hand of Barack Obama's running mate, passing him folded-up notes, a white cap and ticket stubs to autograph. "Bring my brother home from Iraq, please," one woman begs.

DELAWARE Sen. Joe Biden has been telling people for months that he's going to run for president, as if nobody could actually believe it. Even when he formally announced last week, I still didn't believe it. In fact, I'm not quite sure what it would take to make me believe it. If I turned on the television and watched Biden formally accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, I might believe it then.

Vice President Joe Biden showed preelection support for the Lebanese government Friday, prompting a piqued response from the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah and highlighting the critical nature of the upcoming parliamentary vote. Speaking to reporters after arriving in Lebanon amid tight security, Biden warned that U.S. aid to the country could be reevaluated in the event of a win by Hezbollah, which Washington considers a terrorist group.

In this town, you can always judge the significance of a major political event by the number of jokes it generates. Thus, even before Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.) announced Wednesday that he was withdrawing from the presidential race amid reports that he had plagiarized speeches and exaggerated his academic record, almost everyone had heard that he was going to pull out--as soon as he found a copy of the speech that former Sen. Gary Hart had used a couple of months ago.