by Jules Witcover

The pressures on Barack Obama from the upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East demonstrate anew the unpredictable burdens of the presidency, and the difficulty for the occupant of the Oval Office to focus on his own political and policy agenda.

The latest foreign crisis comes on top of the critical diversions that first confronted him -- a collapsing banking system and national economy and two foreign wars. The presidency these days, it has often been legitimately observed, has become too big for any one person to handle.

Nevertheless, the Constitution clearly places all executive power in the president's hands. And although a huge federal bureaucracy has blossomed over more than 200 years, creating an army of subordinates to assist him, the buck still stops at his desk, as Harry Truman said.

Hardly noticed over at least the last two decades, however, presidential employment of the vice president has expanded to a remarkable degree under both Democratic and Republican chief executives. We now have in the White House what fairly could be called an untitled assistant president.

The last three vice presidents -- Al Gore, Dick Cheney and now Joe Biden -- have functioned with extraordinary delegated powers from their president unparalleled in the past. Gore's assignments from Bill Clinton were chiefly in areas of his expertise like environmental and energy issues. But in Cheney and Biden, the vice president has become a presidential adviser-in-chief across the whole range of executive responsibilities.

Cheney for eight years carried out the task as a rather shadowy and hovering figure over George W. Bush's shoulder. Nine months into their administration, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cheney often was spirited away to "undisclosed locations" for security reasons dictated by the new threat. But it was a precaution never taken for such anonymous veeps as Elbridge Gerry, Schuyler Colfax or Levi P. Morton.

Particularly in the field of national defense, Cheney functioned with an experienced staff of his own paralleling that of the president. He became an architect of the Bush energy policy and the invasion of Iraq, as well as chief defender and expander of presidential power, including treatment of war prisoners and terrorist suspects. At one point, when Cheney was hospitalized with a minor heart attack, the joke circulated in Washington that if he died, "Bush would become president."

Biden similarly has become Obama's executive jack-of-all-trades, but much more visibly at his side at most key administration announcements. In the domestic realm, Obama has made Biden the prime overseer of the economic stimulus recovery with governors and mayors. And in foreign policy, Biden is the chief monitor of the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the efforts to wind them down.

In Obama's exhaustive review that culminated in the surge of more troops into Afghanistan pushed by the Pentagon, Biden was the house skeptic, urging the president to refocus from counterinsurgency to the original quest for the al-Qaida perpetrators of 9/11. While Obama in the end acquiesced in the troop surge and Osama bin Laden remains at large, Biden's pushing back against the generals had a moderating influence. He remains close to Obama to the point that Biden has said he has been asked to stay on the Democratic ticket in 2012 and has agreed.

Through most of the history of the American vice presidency, the office was seen as having little significance or utility in the governing of the nation's affairs, beyond being the presidential standby. Most often it was awarded in terms of ticket balancing by geography or ideology, or as a reward for past political service. The vice presidency was chronically subject to lame jokes and its occupant to ridicule, often with reason. When the first vice president, John Adams, took office in 1789, he acknowledged: "In this I am nothing, but I may be everything."

That dismal appraisal no longer holds, as the tenures of Gore, Cheney and Biden have emphatically demonstrated. One can only hope that future presidential nominees will similarly choose and use qualified running mates, in their own best interests and in the country's. It has not always been so.

 

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The Making of the Assistant President | Politics

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