TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after launching what his aides touted as an assault on President Bush and his foreign and defense policies, Senator Joseph Biden found himself accepting the president’s thanks. As members of Congress scattered following last Tuesday’s attack—some to their homes, some to Capitol Hill bars, some to protected locations—Bush phoned the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Air Force One to express his gratitude. “He thanked me for my words of support,” says Biden. On his way home to Delaware with Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Brady, Biden assured Bush of his continued backing. “Whatever I can do, I’ll do.” To use a grim adaptation of the old cliché: What a difference a day makes. The day before the attack, Bush’s relationship with Senate Democrats generally, and Joe Biden specifically, could not have been more strained. On top of unrelenting criticism on the budget—now, practically meaningless—Democrats were preparing a fresh attack. Shortly before he was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club last Monday, Biden’s staff eagerly distributed an article from that morning’s Los Angeles Times. According to the paper, Biden was going to lead an “assault” by his party on President Bush’s foreign policy, a “policy offensive” focused on Bush’s proposal for missile defense funding. Senate Democrats would “challenge the Bush administration’s vision of threats to the United States in the post-Cold War world,” because they saw “a political vulnerability on foreign policy.” Biden’s speech was beyond blunt. The president’s missile defense policy was deemed “nonsense,” his advisers “relics of the Cold War.” Missile defense opponents maintain that the speech was prophetic. “The real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack,” Biden argued. To hurt the United States, he asked rhetorically, are you more likely to fire a missile, or “put somebody with a backpack crossing the border from Vancouver down to Seattle, or coming up New York Harbor with a rusty old ship with an atom bomb sitting in the hull?” But it’s not likely to have a place in any future Biden press kit. The Press Club speech—and a preview of it on Meet the Press the day before—was to have been just one element in a sort of coming out week for Biden. Often mentioned as a potential 2004 challenger to Bush—speculation he has not discouraged—Biden was all set to play an important adversarial role in two high-profile confirmation hearings. The Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Biden is a senior member, was to hold a hearing Tuesday on Bush’s drug czar nominee, John Walters. And Biden’s Foreign Relations Committee was set to grill John Negroponte, a career foreign service officer who is Bush’s nominee to serve as U.N. ambassador, the following day. Although late speculation was that both nominees would eventually be confirmed, the hearings were expected to be rough, with Biden throwing many of the sharpest elbows. Though Walters’s hearing was postponed, Biden pledged to expedite hearings of top foreign policy advisers the White House designated as crucial to responding to last week’s attacks. Negroponte got his hearing Thursday. Biden (who left the hearing briefly to take a call from Secretary of State Colin Powell) raised questions as expected about Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s. But he also pointed to Negroponte’s “distinguished record of service to the nation” and voted in favor of confirmation. The committee vote was 14-3—with Democrats Paul Wellstone, Barbara Boxer, and Russ Feingold in opposition. Full Senate confirmation is expected within days. Outside the Capitol shortly after the Negroponte hearings on Thursday, Biden was full of praise for Bush. “The president, God love him, has an overwhelmingly difficult job right now,” Biden said. “There is a coalescing of liberals, conservatives, moderates, everyone. And I think the administration is doing a hell of a job.” Some Republicans argue that while Biden has publicly backed Bush, he hasn’t been as cooperative behind the scenes. “He hasn’t been as bad as some others, like Senator Dodd, but he could be doing more,” says a top Republican aide working on these issues. The aide pointed to Biden’s caviling over language in the resolution authorizing Bush to use force. “We should be acting together on this, and he’s nitpicking on language,” complained the aide. But others say Biden has, on the whole, been helpful. “It’s not just Biden,” says a GOP leadership aide. “It’s everyone.” Oddly enough, it looks as though Biden will see his ambitions better served as Bush’s best Democratic friend in the Senate, than as his chief adversary.
