SPEAKING FREELY, BIDEN FINDS INFLUENTIAL ROLE

WASHINGTON -- When President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. meet for their standing Friday lunch engagement, Mr. Obama always
picks the cuisine -- a subtle break from previous administrations in
which the president and the vice president typically ordered off a
menu, and a reminder, if any was needed, about who is in charge.

"The dietary bar is set by the president," said Ron Klain, Mr. Biden's
chief of staff, who recently fielded a prelunch query from the White
House kitchen about whether Mr. Biden wanted sour cream with his tacos
(he did). "Biden eats anything. He's a pretty easy guy that way."

The description ("Biden eats anything") extends to the heaping plate
of policy assignments the vice president has been served in recent
weeks. He has been charged with overseeing the distribution of the
$787 billion authorized by the economic stimulus bill, heading the
White House's "middle-class task force" and jumping into any number of
treacherous diplomatic arenas, from Pakistan to Capitol Hill.

Officials involved in the deliberations said Mr. Biden had been
influential in Mr. Obama's development of a new approach to
Afghanistan, announced Friday, arguing for a relatively limited
increase of military, diplomatic and economic involvement.

Mr. Biden has settled into a role of what Mr. Obama compares to a
basketball player "who does a bunch of things that don't show up in
the stat sheet," the president said in an interview Friday. "He gets
that extra rebound, takes the charge, makes that extra pass."

Mr. Biden's reputation for windiness, self-regard and unrestrained
ambition have long prompted some degree of eye-rolling around him and
probably always will. But what has been striking to many in the
administration has been how strenuously the president has worked to
include him and, perhaps most notably, the influence Mr. Biden appears
to be wielding.

Top aides say it has become customary for Mr. Obama to solicit Mr.
Biden's opinion at the end of meetings. But his views by no means
always carry the day. At one January meeting to discuss the budget,
Mr. Biden railed that the government was in no fiscal shape to pursue
a health care overhaul this year -- to the dismay of many present and
others who heard about it.

The vice president later backed off, but Mr. Obama -- who disagreed
strongly with the view -- has come to see Mr. Biden as a useful
contrarian in the course of decision-making.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said that "when there's
group-think going on, the vice president tends to push the envelope in
the other direction."

Members of Mr. Biden's staff said, however, that Mr. Biden would not
be made available for an interview for this article. But they helped
make others available to testify on his behalf: Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Obama, who took a few minutes on a day
when he was setting a new course for the war in Afghanistan to express
appreciation for, among other things, Mr. Biden's willingness to speak
his mind.

"There's, I think, an institutional barrier sometimes to truth-telling
in front of the president," Mr. Obama said. "Joe is very good about
sometimes articulating what's on other people's minds, or things that
they've said in private conversations that people have been less
willing to say in public. Joe, in that sense, can help stir the pot."

Mr. Biden's colleagues in the administration -- and former ones in the
Senate -- describe him with fondness, often as "Joe," and catalog his
old-fashioned kindnesses (he sent a two-page note to the wife of
Education Secretary Arne Duncan after meeting her at Mr. Duncan's
introductory news conference).

But they also acknowledge that the verbose vice president has
struggled to adjust at times to working within a White House that
prizes discipline.

During the fall campaign, Mr. Obama's aides -- usually David Axelrod,
the media strategist, and David Plouffe, the campaign manager -- spent
considerable time on the phone with Mr. Biden and his staff over
remarks that they had deemed unhelpful. Mr. Biden listened and saluted
smartly.

"He was a good soldier," said Senator Ted Kaufman, Democrat of
Delaware, who had been Mr. Biden's Senate chief of staff before being
appointed to his old boss's seat. "But I sat with him. That was hard,
that was hard. He has all these ideas."

Mr. Biden's public statements and appearances have been closely
monitored inside the administration, and at times fretted over. "Like
every single human being, his strength is his weakness, his weakness
is his strength," said Mr. Axelrod, now Mr. Obama's senior adviser at
the White House. "I think the strength outweighs the weakness to a
large degree. And it's all related to someone who speaks his mind and
is forthright."

Mr. Biden has taken steps to rein himself in -- or others have
insisted on it. He has begun to use a teleprompter more. He often uses
note cards to stay focused while presiding over meetings. He has given
few interviews since Election Day, and those have focused mainly on
discrete policy topics.

"He knows a lot, and he is extremely experienced," Mrs. Clinton said
of Mr. Biden, with whom she has breakfast each Tuesday. "I think
sometimes he has to be a little aware he could literally educate the
rest of us on an issue for a long time."

To some extent, the question of "What about Joe?" has hung over the
Obama operation from the day he joined the Democratic ticket last
summer. Mr. Biden, 66, was seen as an odd fit -- a Senate lifer on a
team bent on changing politics, a loose cannon in a laser-guided
message machine.

On his campaign bus in Ohio last fall, Mr. Biden recounted what Mr.
Obama told him when he asked him to be his running mate. "I want you
to view this as the capstone of your career," Mr. Obama said,
according to Mr. Biden. To which Mr. Biden quipped: "And not the tombstone."

(Keeping with the stone metaphor in the interview, Mr. Obama credits
Mr. Biden as not using the vice presidency as "a stepping stone.")

Before he took the job, Mr. Biden sought assurances that his would not
be just a ceremonial position and that he would have substantive
assignments. Mr. Obama envisioned his vice president as having a role
distinct from the last two -- Dick Cheney, who was his own power
center in the White House, and Al Gore, who took on signature issues
and assignments like the environment and government reform that he
hoped would help his anticipated run for president.

Mr. Obama wanted his No. 2 to be a kind of uber-adviser and
interdisciplinary trouble-shooter. "Joe and I agreed that I wasn't
going to be handing him one narrow portfolio," Mr. Obama said.

Early indications are that the partnership has evolved as they had
imagined. "I think he's playing the role as 'adviser in chief' that he
has foreseen," Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Biden, adding that he was
"involved in the whole agenda of the president."

When both men are in town, Mr. Biden regularly makes the 17-step walk
from his West Wing office to the president's. They speak by phone
(communicating rarely if ever by e-mail), and Mr. Obama will
spontaneously call and ask the vice president to join him in meetings.

Mr. Biden attends Mr. Obama's morning briefings on national security
and the economy. He has full access to the president's schedule and is
free to attend anything.

People close to Mr. Obama said he had come to appreciate his vice
president's loyalty, practical view of politics and connection with
working-class voters. The president, they said, finds Mr. Biden
reminiscent -- in a good way -- of a lot of the ethnic politicians who
pervaded an older generation in Chicago.

Mr. Biden also has a different approach to group decision-making,
which Mr. Obama believes adds value to the undertaking. Mr. Biden is
inclined to throw notions on the table and think out loud, which
contrasts with Mr. Obama's more deliberate, restrained style.

In public, Mr. Biden is by turns self-deprecating and
self-aggrandizing. "Please sit down, I'm only the vice president," he
said, pooh-poohing a standing ovation before a recent ceremony in
which he introduced the new White House drug czar.

He then detailed his extensive background in drug prevention. "I wrote
what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the '90s," he said.

Mr. Biden betrays a giddiness at his current station (jokingly
inviting strangers to "come take a ride on my plane") while speaking
often about the hardships of his past (surviving two brain aneurysms,
enduring the aftermath of the 1972 car crash that killed his first
wife and infant daughter).

Senator Kaufman said, "Ask me who's the luckiest person I know, I'd
say Joe Biden. And if you ask me who's the unluckiest, I'd say Joe
Biden."

Like Mr. Cheney was, Mr. Biden is assumed to be in his last elected
office. But friends of Mr. Biden -- who has twice run for president --
said he was not necessarily cured of his Oval Office fever. "I can't
believe that he won't think about it," Mr. Kaufman said, adding that
Mr. Biden has "totally sublimated" any such thoughts for now.

The vice president will be 74 in 2016. "We're not ruling anything in
or out," said Jay Carney, a spokesman for Mr. Biden.

No one in the Obama administration would present Mr. Biden as the
sleek new thing in American politics. "I understand that he's not the
classic 21st-century, blog-era communicator," said Mr. Klain, the vice
president's chief of staff. "But a lot of the country is where he is,
and a lot of the country connects with his public presentations."

Speaking to employees recently at a bus manufacturer in St. Cloud,
Minn., Mr. Biden invoked his father, a car salesman, who "had to make
that long walk up a very short flight of stairs" to deliver the news
to his family that he had lost his job. Several people in the audience
could be seen wiping tears from their eyes.

After leaving the plant, Mr. Biden went to the airport by motorcade
and lingered on the tarmac for several minutes. He greeted area
residents and offered everyone that ride in the back of his big plane.