Knowing the old can help the new
When Joe and Jill Biden moved to Washington on Jan. 20, they moved their bed down from the family home in Wilmington, Del. Unlike their predecessors, the Gores and Cheneys who lived in the Washington suburbs and had houses filled with furniture to transfer to the official vice-president's residence, the Bidens had empty rooms to fill.
His 92-year-old mother remains at their Wilmington home and the Bidens have been back there every weekend except the last, when he was in Munich to address an annual security conference that is an important gathering of Russian and NATO officials.
So, as the Obama administration labored to move its giant fiscal stimulus bill through the House and Senate, Jill Biden, who is starting her new college teaching job in northern Virginia, tried to select the family's furniture for the next four years.
When I saw her husband at his White House office Tuesday, he was still a little jet-lagged from the rapid-turnaround trip to Germany. But after three decades as an every-night Senate commuter, Biden was reveling in two new experiences: living close to work and "being part of the administration." The latter takes much more getting used to. As the senior White House official with an office in the Capitol, Biden has been in the middle of the effort to round up stimulus votes. That was familiar work on the Senate side of the Capitol, where Biden spent 36 years and knows the personalities and political ticks of most - and where, he said, "I think all of them trust me." The House is entirely different. Biden said he got to know a few of the senior members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees that he met as they tried to iron out differences on bills. But the House member he knows best is Mike Castle, the Delaware congressman-at-large and a Republican. who is one of the few surviving moderates on that side of the aisle, a throwback to the time when states from Maryland to Maine liked to send progressive Republicans to Congress. A respected legislator, he has limited value as a guide to this House GOP conference, dominated by conservatives. Biden, an admitted amateur as an analyst of the House, said he thinks some Republicans "see the administration's failure as their success." Others have "genuine philosophical disagreements with what we are trying to do." And still others press for greater reliance on tax cuts to bolster their side in the internal debate about the best formula for Republican electoral victories.
What surprised me was Biden's puzzlement - and mild exasperation - with the lessons he is learning about House Democrats. It was so long ago I can't remember when I first heard a veteran House Democrat repeat this bit of folk wisdom: "The House Republicans are not the enemy. They are the opposition. The enemy is the Senate." When I quoted that line to Biden, he exclaimed, "They really mean it," as if he were hearing it for the first time.
A day before the House and Senate negotiators reached agreement, Biden said he was "a little surprised" to find no sympathy among House Democrats for the stimulus bill compromise needed to persuade a handful of Senate Republicans to join the Democrats in blocking a filibuster. "The House guys complain that you (in the administration) are rolling us," Biden told me. "We're not rolling anyone. We're looking to get 60 votes."
I do not know if Obama, who served four years in the Senate but never in the House, shared his running mate's sense of puzzlement and frustration. It was probably a lucky break for the administration that Rahm Emanuel was also around to work the House. Obama's chief of staff was the No. 4 man in the House Democratic leadership. If anyone could placate Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants who run the key committees, it was probably Emanuel. This week was the first big test.
© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group