Biden, Effective VP

Click here for an article in American Prospect by Paul Waldman entitled The Real Stakes in the Veepstakes. It was John Nance Garner, VP to FDR for eight years before he resigned over the president's proposal to pack the Supreme Court, who compared the office to "a bucket of warm piss." John Adams and Daniel Webster also had a derisory description of the vice presidency. Walter Mondale, before he became Carter's VP, submitted a list of demands; Carter accepted, and Mondale, with 12 year's experience in the Senate, was very helpful guiding Carter, who had no Washington experience; and the vice president has been more effective ever since (with the mind-boggling exception of the cipher Dan Quayle; Sarah Palin, thank God, didn't make it).

The article is about the selection of a vice president in 2016, but I like the description of Biden's effeciveness:

... one of the great unsung accomplishments of Obama’s tenure is the 2009 Recovery Act, in which the administration not only stopped the economy’s bleeding, but also successfully distributed $787 billion in a relatively short time with barely any of that famous “waste, fraud, and abuse” everyone talks about in Washington—not to mention no major corruption scandals. Biden oversaw and coordinated that implementation. As Michael Grunwald writes in his book about the law, The New New Deal, in the two years after it was passed, Biden “would convene twenty-two cabinet meetings on the Recovery Act, more than the president would convene on all topics, and visit fifty-six stimulus projects. He’d host fifty-seven conference calls with governors and mayors, and spend countless hours checking in, buttering up and banging heads to keep the cash flowing. He’d speak about the stimulus with every governor except Sarah Palin, who abruptly resigned to pursue a career in punditry and reality TV before he had a chance. He’d also block 260 Recovery Act projects that didn’t pass his smell test.”