He's chosen his running mate — but what would President Biden actually do?

Joe Biden arrived in the US Senate in 1973 and served eight years as vice president; he is the ultimate known quantity in American politics. He has a runaway mouth, a garrulous, largely amiable personality and an indefatigable ego. Then why is it so hard to envision what a Biden presidency would be like?

Part of it is that Biden’s most recent long run in the spotlight of American politics was as Vice President, a role meant to deemphasise his own opinions, judgment, and distinctive identity. If it ever gets that far, it will be interesting to see whether his running mate, Kamala Harris, takes a similarly low profile in the job.

You have to look long and hard to find any times that Barack Obama and Joe Biden disagreed significantly during the Obama presidency. One of the rare examples came in the spring and summer of 2012, when Joe Biden met with a group of prominent gay Democrats in Los Angeles and more or less blurted out that he supported gay marriage. In 1996, Biden had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, and, until then, believed that civil unions were the appropriate option for gay couples. In 2008, Obama sat in Saddleback Church with pastor Rick Warren and declared, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” a statement that Obama chief strategist David Axelrod later characterised as a lie.

At that meeting of gay Democrats in Los Angeles in April 2012, Biden said, without any warning, “things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to become a political liability in the near term for an individual to say, ‘I oppose gay marriage.’ Mark my words… My job — our job — is to keep this momentum rolling to the inevitable.” Two weeks later, Biden appeared on NBC News and laid it out even more clearly: “I am vice president of the United States. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”

This created an instant stir inside the White House; Valerie Jarrett accused Biden of disloyalty. Biden apologised to Obama for publicly staking out a position contrary to the president’s — there’s little indication that Obama was all that bothered — and few days later, Obama did an exclusive television interview and announced he, too, had suddenly discovered he supported gay marriage.

If you like Joe Biden, this story illustrates him at his best — examining a public issue through how the law truly affects people, showing empathy to those who have different experiences from him, concluding that equality is the preeminent value, and then forthrightly declaring what he believes to be right, regardless of the political consequences. (It is worth noting that the political consequences of a Democrat supporting gay marriage in 2012 were pretty minimal, and opposition to gay marriage more or less evaporated overnight in the Democratic Party once Obama endorsed it.)

If you don’t like Joe Biden, this story illustrates some of his worst traits. He didn’t consult or warn anyone before blurting out a consequential change in policy. His change-of-heart just happened to align with what a powerful Democratic constituency wanted to hear. And ever the good soldier, when Biden realised he might have caused a new political headache for Obama, he apologised for doing what he thought was right.

Joe Biden has been around the top of Democratic Party politics for a long time, but he’s rarely been the guy charting a new direction. He’s the back-slapping dealmaker who wants to get along with everyone and who wants everyone to get along with each other. His fellow senators liked him but also considered him to be a long-winded buffoon. During one meandering Biden speech, then-senator Obama passed a note to staffer wishing, “Shoot. Me. Now.” His former staffers love him, but also often felt the need to shoot down his nuttier ideas, like sending $200 million to the Iranian government after 9/11. If you’ve abhorred the impulsiveness, unpredictability, long meandering speeches, cringe-inducing rhetoric and flashes of temper in Donald Trump for the past four years, Joe Biden may not be quite so different.

There’s also no getting around the fact that Biden turns 78 shortly after the election — older than Ronald Reagan at the end of his second term — and his campaign is reluctant to put him out in front of the cameras any more than is absolutely necessary. Is Biden senile or suffering from Alzheimer’s? Probably not, as he seemed reasonably sharp in that last debate with Bernie Sanders. But we’ve seen Biden on our screens for decades now, and we can see with our own eyes that Biden speaks slower, his sentences and thoughts seem to wander, he seems a little less focused and sharp than he was during the Obama years. People fairly wonder if Biden would serve a whole four years — and if not, what kind of president Kamala Harris would be.

Biden won the Democratic nomination because after the first four contests, he was the strongest option for centrists and/or non-Socialists who were terrified at the thought of nominating Sanders. Biden is pursuing a general election strategy of laying low and letting Americans see the November election as a referendum on Donald Trump — and so far, that’s working for him. But that’s not much of a formula for a mandate, other than “don’t be Donald Trump.” Nominating Biden in a haze of Obama nostalgia and anti-Bernie sentiment amounted to kicking the can down the road even further on sorting out whether the party has any Bill Clinton-esque “Third Way” impulses left or whether the Democrats are indeed a party consumed by the woke quasi-socialism of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her “squad.”

A recent Rasmussen survey found 59 per cent of likely voters believe “it’s likely Biden’s running mate will be president before the end of Biden’s four-year term if he wins this fall.” When voters contemplate what they get with a Biden presidency, they will also be looking very closely at Kamala Harris, and grappling with the question of how much of a Biden presidency there will be.