Because of his miscues, Biden’s staff lives on pins and needles. Mission Impossible: Managing Biden

BLACKSBURG, Va. — The most emotionally powerful minute of Joe Biden’s two-day swing through rural Virginia almost didn’t happen.

After the vice president paid a solemn visit Wednesday to the memorial honoring the victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting here, reporters asked him about his feelings upon seeing the site.


As Biden began to answer, his aides intervened, yelling “Let’s go,” and trying to shoo reporters back to the motorcade.

( PHOTOS: Joe Biden over the years)

Only when it became clear that the vice president wanted to express himself did his entourage stop interrupting to let the candidate speak.

When he did, Biden recalled his own family tragedy — losing his young wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident — and paused repeatedly to keep his composure.

It was the side of Biden — comfortable with his emotions, and with a gift for human connection — that makes him appealing to many voters. And the moment never would’ve taken place if he had not effectively overruled his would-be handlers.

It was a vivid illustration of a phenomenon that pervades the 2012 campaign: The consuming effort by operatives to stamp the spontaneity and life out of modern politics.

( Also on POLITICO: Ryan: Biden is ‘desperate’)

Of course, Biden’s two-day swing through small-town Virginia also offered a perfect example of why this brand of control-freak politics has emerged. His unrehearsed comment to a mixed-race audience in Danville that the Republicans and their Wall Street allies want to put people “ back in chains” made national news as an example of rhetorical excess.

In an era of Twitter and saturation news coverage — when one stray remark can upend a day’s news cycle and campaigns struggle to shape their preferred message — politicians and their aides are increasingly intent on restricting the media’s interaction with candidates. Barack Obama or Mitt Romney both shun the sort of freewheeling news conferences that used to be a staple of campaigns. And when reporters do seek to engage the candidates, the staff minders attempt to shut it down with ham-handed aggressiveness.

All candidates live with the contradiction — a media culture that implores politicians to seem authentic but is ready to punish them when they really are — but the challenge is especially exquisite in Biden’s case.

( Also on POLITICO: Axelrod: 'Chains' not racial comment)

He is an irrepressible, garrulous and emotive politician, who’s flourished and fumbled through 40 years in national office by practicing politics the old-fashioned way — from the gut and without much script. He’s as fine a one-on-one politician of any officeholder of his generation, a talent especially prized because it is not a particular gift of Obama’s.

But his penchant for off-message moments regularly sends aides in the West Wing and at Chicago reelection headquarters into orbit.

His staff’s response is effectively to try to save Biden from himself. During the Virginia trip reporters were hustled out of retail campaign stops in diners and other intimate settings, aides tried to edit media pool reports for any potential landmines that could be seized on by Republicans and even hovered at close range to eavesdrop on journalists’ conversations with attendees at Biden rallies.

If obsessive control is the order of the day in both presidential campaigns, it is also clear overzealousness can boomerang.

Take the case of Romney’s overseas trip last month.

When the travelling press corps attempted to ask questions of Romney as he walked to his car in Warsaw last month, a press aide cursed at the journalists. But the overreaction created the exact sort of off-message distraction it was meant to preempt when, later in the morning, the dressing-down found its way into the live reports on network morning news shows back in the states.

The attempt to control Biden, or limit visibility to a natural politician practicing his craft can often seem especially self-defeating.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine Obama convincingly tell a NASACR owner that he’d rather have won Daytona than be vice president, as Biden did in Stuart, Va. Nor is it likely that Romney would, after hearing of the death of a woman’s father, instinctively put his hand on her cheek in sympathy, as Biden did during a stop in Radford.

Yet because of his miscues, Biden’s staff lives on pins and needles. This leads to odd decisions.

For example, on Tuesday the vice president made an off-the-schedule stop at a cafe in the little courthouse town of Stuart . After meeting the owner of a Daytona 500-winning NASCAR team, Biden was asked about Social Security and Medicare by a crowd of a couple dozen seniors. In the aftermath of Paul Ryan joining the GOP ticket, it’s a topic Democrats are delighted to discuss. Yet just as Biden was saying “voucher-ize,” his aides started to not so subtly nudge reporters that it was time to leave.

It might seem like an opportune time to have reporters present to record and amplify his party’s message. But Biden aides sent the traveling press marching out.

What’s perhaps most striking about the Biden staff’s attempts at press management is its effort to influence what goes in the pool reports from his off-schedule stops. Because the entire press corps cannot easily jam in, say, a diner or private home, it is standard practice to have a single designated reporter take notes and share the material with colleagues from other news organizations. These reports are designed entirely for the media, but are distributed by White House staffers. In the case of Obama, as with his predecessors, the reports are simply forwarded without comment by email to a news media distribution list.

But on two occasions during Biden’s Virginia trip, his staff sought to have certain elements in the reports highlighted while reporters drafted them and discussed the contents with the reporters after the summaries had been sent but before they had before sent to the broader media.

Staffers spinning reporters to frame events the best they can is, of course, commonplace in politics. But attempting to intervene in the drafting of accounts that reporters share with one another is all but unheard of and reflects the deep concern Biden’s team has about offering any fodder to the opposition.

Biden officials emphasize how many off-schedule stops he makes on his campaign travels and, noting that that they let reporters hang around his visit to a high school football practice on Monday, point out that they were less restrictive before the “chains” comment.

Yet it’s the response to that remark that is so telling about their leash-tightening instincts when Biden has one of his moments. And the staff restrictiveness seems contagious.

By mid-day Wednesday, following a rally on the Virginia Tech campus, a press aide for the Virginia campaign was eavesdropping as a reporter attempted to interview attendees who had spoken with the vice president on the rope line. The snooping happened with one attendee on one side of the gym and with another on the opposite end.

Yet what the campaign doesn’t seem to realize is that Biden is at his best when he’s not being minded.

“The thing that people really like about Joe Biden is he says what he thinks,” explained former Sen. Ted Kaufman, the Delaware Democrat who once served as Biden’s chief of staff and replaced him in the Senate

After much of the elementary school gym had cleared out following a Tuesday night rally in the southwest Virginia town of Wytheville, the vice president was still working the remaining people left. Most of his staff and much of the press corps had already gone.

A father was trying to take a picture of his two children and wife with Biden, but the vice president had a better idea.

He grabbed the camera, whirled around and handed it to his security man. Then Biden reached out and made sure the dad was in the photo, too.

They were all beaming. But Biden didn’t stop with a photo op, he also bent down and had a word with the two kids.

Afterword, the dad, a Wytheville resident named Mark McHayle, said he found Biden “down to earth” and had his 13-year-old son recite what instructions the vice president had given him.

“Keep the boys away from your sister and make sure your mother is happy,” the adolescent repeated.

It was a genuine moment, pure Biden. But, in his campaign and others, it’s becoming more difficult to witness such authentic exchanges. The artifice of teleprompters and talking points is becoming the rule. It’s not a system that the Joe Biden of 1972, the year he won a Senate seat at age 29, would recognize.