Biden'S Brief.(Biden, Joe)

On a recent afternoon, Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for Vice-President, could be found inside a tent, pitched beside a pond in Claude Moore Park, in northern Virginia. His Secret Service agents, who were dispersed among the trees, formed a perimeter around the candidate; his motorcade, consisting of half a dozen cars, idled on a gravel road nearby. A portable toilet had been hauled into the woods and stood outside the tent. This was no wilderness; the park is in the suburb of Sterling, a place rich with potential supporters of Barack Obama. But the image of Biden relaxing at a picnic table in the tent, with his ten-year-old granddaughter Finnegan, who was cheerfully drawing on a napkin, gave the impression of a man not at the center of combat but off on a distant mission.

At George W. Bush's final State of the Union speech, in January, not long after Biden ended his own Presidential campaign, Obama approached him to ask for his support in the remaining primaries. Biden is close to Bill and Hillary Clinton (she once told him, "I think you and Bill were separated at birth"), and he said that he would stay neutral until the nomination was settled. "If you win, I'll do anything you ask me to do," Biden told Obama. Obama replied, "Be careful, because I may ask you a lot." They had another conversation in February, and Obama continued to cajole him. "The only question I have is not whether I want you in this Administration," Obama told Biden. "It's which job you'd like best."

During the primaries, which continued until June, Obama and Biden spoke about twice a week. "He'd call not so much to ask for advice as to bounce things off me," Biden said as we sat in the tent. "And then when he asked me if I would consider being vetted"--possible Vice-Presidential candidates must submit to a personal and financial investigation by the campaign--"I said I'd have to think about it."

Biden, who has served in the United States Senate for thirty-six years, wasn't certain that the Vice-Presidency was an improvement over his current position. "I've got a job I think matters now, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee," he said. "Presumptuous for me to say, but at least--at a minimum--I've been able to influence the direction of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. And I've been relatively--presumptuous to say--relatively successful legislatively in the Senate, being able to win a lot of Republican friends, and being able to cross the aisle. And so it wasn't self-evident to me that being Vice-President would be a better job--you know what I mean?"

Biden agreed to let Obama's campaign team consider him, but with a caveat: "I wanted to make sure we understood each other--that, even if I vetted and he wanted me to take the job, I wasn't committing to do that. When the time was appropriate for him, if I was the guy, I needed to spend at least two or three hours with him to understand what the role would be." Biden wanted what amounted to an oral contract between him and Obama, spelling out his specific responsibilities in an Obama White House.

On August 6th, Biden said, the Obama campaign "smuggled" him into Minneapolis, where Obama was campaigning, and the two senators stayed up late in a suite at the Graves 601 Hotel working out the details of a potential deal. Obama told Biden that the vetting had gone well--Biden assured me that it was "very complimentary." Biden happens to be one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, although his family's joint income was more than three hundred thousand dollars last year. (His wife, Jill, has a Ph.D. in education and teaches at Delaware Technical & Community College.) His relatively straightforward tax returns and uncomplicated financial situation made the process easier. "All these years and you still have no money," Obama said to Biden, teasingly.

The conversation in Minneapolis ranged from foreign policy and possible appointments to the federal courts to the legislative strategy that would be needed to pass an Obama agenda. Obama wanted to know how Biden had managed his signature achievements--such as the 1994 crime bill, which added a hundred thousand federally funded police officers to city streets. He also tested Biden's understanding of how broad his role would be, as opposed to that of another contender--apparently, Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of ...