Biden chases place at center of Obama's orbit

WASHINGTON (AP) When President Barack Obama summoned congressional leaders for an urgent meeting last month, at the height of a fiscal crisis, Joe Biden wasn't initially mentioned as a participant. The vice president's staff quickly followed up with reporters, in case any had been wondering: Biden would be there, too.

On another occasion, Biden let a crowd at a sandwich shop know he couldn't linger. "The president is waiting," he announced to the room. "I'm having lunch with him today."

The two moments are emblematic of a vice president who has sought to make himself as central as possible in the orbit of influence in the White House without overstepping the vice president's role in ways he has said had left a terrible aftertaste from the Bush White House, when Vice President Dick Cheney was seen as having an outsized influence.

It's a delicate balance that has at times paid off for Biden, who built up relationships with world leaders over his decades-long Senate career. Obama has turned to his leadership and judgment at critical junctures in his presidency, validating Biden both publicly and privately.

On Sunday, Biden will depart for a week in Asia to meet with key leaders in a region where Obama has prominently committed to ramp up America's influence. Biden's visit to China, Japan and South Korea comes two months after Obama had to cancel his own Asia trip because of the partial government shutdown, leaving the White House seeking ways to prove it's still serious about the Asia rebalance.

"Barack Obama was smart enough when elected president to know he didn't know everything," said Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat who's known Biden since the 1970s. "One of the things he didn't really have as good of a grasp on was our relationship with leaders around the world."

Constitutionally, the vice president has only as much power as the president cares to give him or her. But as Obama's two-term deputy, Biden will see his political fortunes forever linked to the president, whose approval ratings are sagging amid the disastrous rollout of his signature health care program. How the public ultimately perceives Obama's presidency and Biden's role in it will be critical to Biden if he runs for president again in 2016, as he plans to consider.

At times, Biden's balancing act has meant being relegated to lower-profile tasks or conspicuously absent at key moments, such as health care rollout.

In a departure from some previous vice presidents, his aides say, Biden has never sought out specific assignments from the president. What matters is being where the action is, a key player on the issues of utmost importance to the administration, the aides said.

When he first walked through the doors of the White House, Biden was determined to be different from his immediate predecessor. Dick Cheney's heavy-handed accumulation of power had drilled a huge fault line through the Bush administration, Biden said.

He said he didn't want to have a portfolio, consigned to low-priority projects that would underutilize his vast experience built up over decades in the Senate crafting laws and building relationships with world leaders.

So Biden set his sights on fashioning himself into president's most influential adviser, aides and friends say, trying to integrate his staff with Obama's so as to maximize his footprint without creating a competing power center within the White House. Where Cheney had amassed a large national security team reporting to him, Biden returned some of those positions to the president's national security staff.

Nearly five years later, it's not hard to find signs that Obama has relied heavily on Biden and his staff at pivotal moments.

Obama called on Biden to lead his gun control campaign, a top priority at the start of the second term. The push in Congress failed, but the vice president emerged as a prominent voice for a signal liberal cause.

Obama has also turned repeatedly to Biden's brain trust to fill key roles. The White House sent Biden's top foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to meet secretly this year with Iranian officials about a possible nuclear deal while Biden aggressively lobbied his former Senate colleagues to hold off on new sanctions.

Biden was missing from October's efforts to avert and later end the 16-day government shutdown, which occurred when Republican attempts to derail the health care law delayed passage of a temporary spending bill.

Some Democratic senators said they were concerned that if Biden showed up, he'd be too eager to save the day and would hash out a deal that would give away far too much. The White House disputes that was the reason Biden wasn't heavily involved, arguing that Obama had decided he wouldn't negotiate and didn't want to send signals to the contrary.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University, said Biden ended up avoiding what could be a political burden down the road.

"He stood out of the way," Brinkley said. "Anybody involved in the shutdown, whose name is synonymous with the shutdown, would have egg on their face."

___

Associated Press writer Josh Lederman contributed to this report. Reach Lederman at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP