Biden walks fine line while testing waters

Vice presidents seem to have an easy time launching presidential campaigns. A vice president has been nominated by his party in every election involving a vice president, sitting or former, compared to a 46 percent rate for governors and 43 percent for senators and an abysmal 0 percent for U.S. representatives.

But vice presidents also have had an extremely difficult time emerging from the larger-than-life shadows of the president they served.

The White House has tried to give Biden a chance. In the last week alone, Biden has honored Sept. 11 victims with Billy Joel, given a gripping interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” talked up his long record on curbing violence against women with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, called for minimum wage hike with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and marched in a Labor Day parade with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Obama this week even showcased Dr. Jill Biden’s career as a community college professor by traveling with her to Michigan to tout his goal of providing two years of community college education for every American who qualifies for it.

And Biden has recently made waves by dabbling in some criticism of the economic recovery under Obama’s watch, though he did so carefully, as a way to underscore the income inequality message he shares with the president. During a Labor Day speech in Pittsburgh, the vice president acknowledged that “something is wrong” with the U.S. economy.

“It used to be when productivity went up in America, everybody got to share,” Biden said. “The people who caused the productivity increase, they got to share. They got a piece of the action. Something is wrong, folks.”

Just a few days later, Obama made it even easier on Biden by delivering a similar message, telling a crowd in Michigan that the unemployment rate is down but “inequality is creeping back up … wages are flat.”

The president blamed corporate greed and the nation’s broken tax system on the flat wages, instead of his own policies, but both statements still drew headlines.

Still, history shows that distancing himself from Obama, even slightly, will be a tricky task. For example, a decade and a half ago, Vice President Al Gore found it hard to develop a strong, separate identity from President Clinton, after Clinton’s impeachment and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and a leading authority on vice presidents, recalls the struggle that Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, faced in trying to distance himself from the Vietnam war in his presidential race after Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

“Different presidents have different tolerance levels of how much slack they are going to give their successors. Lyndon Johnson would give Hubert Humphrey none,” Goldstein told the Washington Examiner.

If Humphrey tried to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular war, Johnson would “make noises” like he was going to run, he said.

The problem came to a head at the 1968 convention when Humphrey, after winning the nomination, was trying to negotiate a Vietnam plank to the Democratic platform that supporters of his challengers could all support. “Johnson was giving him no leeway even to the extent that people were starting to talk about drafting Johnson, which would have really pulled the plug on Humphrey because his support was entirely contingent on Johnson,” Goldstein said.

Two decades later, George H.W. Bush made statements suggesting he would approach a “kindler, gentler” education policy than the Reagan administration. Later, Bush also strongly opposed Reagan’s decision to strike a plea bargain with Manual Noriega, the military dictator of Panama and known drug trafficker whom the U.S. removed from power in 1989.

“It was perceived as publicly distancing himself from Reagan’s position on that, but [Bush] did so when it was late in the [campaign] and in a sort of understated way,” Goldstein recalled.

Goldstein doesn’t see this as an insurmountable problem for Biden because “whether people like him or not, they tend to view him as someone who says what’s on his mind.” But Obama’s lackluster poll ratings remain a problem for Biden, he said.

“The shadows issue isn’t as much of an issue, but he would have the political baggage of being associated with the Obama administration. It’s harder for him to separate from that than for Secretary Clinton” to do so.

In late August, Obama’s disapproval rating rose to 51, meaning that a majority of Americans believe his policies are moving the country in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, Biden’s popularity is on the rise. As he has ramped up his public schedule, his support among Democrats has risen to 20 percent from just 12 a month ago, according to the most recent CNN-ORC poll.

That’s still behind Bernie Sanders, at 22 percent, and Hillary Clinton, who dropped 10 points over the last month to 37 percent.

But the numbers on Biden also show a potentially powerful advantage: The vice president is well-liked among all Americans and would beat all the top Republican candidates in head-to-head match-ups.

The White House has insisted that Obama is remaining neutral in the race, but has clearly been promoting Biden and touting his record.

“In the 2008 race, there was no denying the effectiveness that Sen. Biden demonstrated,” Earnest told reporters Friday. “He’s a tireless campaigner … somebody who relishes the opportunity to do some grassroots politics. That made him an enormous asset to our campaign.”

Earnest also touted Biden’s “extensive international experience” as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has “established relationships with world leaders across the globe.”

Despite all the help he’s getting from the White House, Biden may face other technical issues the longer he waits to officially declare his candidacy. The longer Biden uses his official office to test the waters, the more campaign money he saves — an especially critical issue if he decides to challenge the deep-pocketed and hyper-organized Clinton campaign.

But campaign watchdogs warn that the longer he holds off on an official decision, the more risks he takes in running afoul of campaign finance laws. Any campaign spending must be paid for with candidate-permissible funds, either his own personal money or funds raised in low increments, according to Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

The center has already asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Jeb Bush and his super PAC, Right to Rise, broke campaign finance laws during Bush’s long period of testing the waters. By delaying his official entry into the 2016 race, the center argued that Bush and the super PAC were flouting campaign finance laws by coordinating their activity and raising unlimited contributions.

The Federal Election Commission says that “testing the waters, spending money for the purpose of determining whether to run” is subject to strict limits, Ryan said.

In Biden’s case, it’s a harder determination because many of the events he’s headlining could be perceived as normal vice presidential duties.

“We really need to rely on individuals being honest with the public about what their intentions are,” Ryan said.