“He’s a lot calmer,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina and a close ally. “The anxiety of running and the pressure of a campaign, all that is now behind. Even after the campaign is over, the election is over, all the nonsense coming from the Trump camp, you don’t know how it will all end. You may know how it will end, but you are eager to know how it will end. So, all of that is behind us now. “
Throughout his career, Biden has been a guide rod for the middle of his party, more moderate in the 1990s when it was in vogue and more liberal during the Obama era, when the center of gravity changed.
It is driven less by ideology than by the mechanics of how to draft a bill that satisfies multiple centers of power. A “politician at his fingertips”, as he likes to say, Biden is described by advisers and friends as more intuitive about other politicians and their needs than Obama, but less as a new thinker.
Although he is famous for his mouth-and-mouth gaffes, he can be slow to make decisions, with one meeting rolling to the next while he seeks more opinions. Every morning, he receives a thick instruction book with dozens of guides in a black folder and reads it, but prefers to interact with others. During the transition, he conducted many of his instructions using Zoom at his desk in his home library in Wilmington, Del., Or at Queen, the nearby theater where a large screen was set up.
He enjoys free discussion, interrupting aides and scolding them for what he considers to be an excessively academic or elitist language. “Pick up the phone, call your mom, read to her what you just said,” he likes to say, according to aides. “If she understands, we can keep talking.” The advisers made a point of editing all abbreviations, except UN and NATO.
As a former aide said, Biden was the guy in college who always led study groups in the dorm, using cards with friends, interacting constantly, while Obama was the monastic and learned student with oil lamps sitting in a room alone examining books .