WASHINGTON – The high-profile White House meeting this week between outgoing and incoming presidents is being followed Thursday night by a much lower-key get-together hosted by Vice President Dick Cheney for his successor, Democrat Joe Biden.

Cheney, preparing to hand off his job as the nation’s second-in-command and following President George W. Bush’s orders for a smooth transition to the Obama administration, invited Biden to the vice president’s residence on the sprawling Naval Observatory grounds in northwest Washington.

The meeting will be more of a social call between Cheney and Biden, though both are steeped with long histories in foreign policy and national security issues, giving them much to discuss beyond the role one is soon passing off to the other.

Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said Cheney and his wife, Lynne, have invited Biden and his wife, Jill, for a meeting and a tour of their soon-to-be official residence.

Biden, a Delaware senator who has been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a grounding in both foreign and domestic affairs honed over more than three decades in politics.

Cheney is known as a chief architect of the war in Iraq and a hard-liner when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. He also presides over the Senate for tie votes.

With no clear-cut job description for the vice president, Cheney has said the role of his successors depends on the wishes of future presidents. Cheney himself isn’t sure whether future vice presidents will be as hands-on as he’s been. “I’m reluctant to say it’s a trend,” Cheney told reporters during an interview in Israel in March. “If you look at the history of the office, it can go either way.”

“You go back and look at how it’s developed over the years, it wasn’t until really, I guess, Richard Nixon was vice president that

he even had an office downtown,” Cheney said. “Harry Truman’s office was on Capitol Hill.”

Bush and President-elect Barack Obama held their historic meeting Monday.

WASHINGTON – The lower 48 haven’t seen the last of Sarah Palin, win or lose.

The presidential campaign has had an odd effect on Palin’s unsettled place in political life. It punctured down-home myths about the Alaska governor and trimmed her down to size. Yet it may have helped her to be taken more seriously as a candidate in her own right, in a future election.
 
Palin came to the country’s attention as a woman in the mold of the man at the top of the Republican ticket. Reformer, independent operator, foe of the status quo. You know, maverick.

What’s the difference between pit bulls John McCain and Sarah Palin?

Lipstick.

So it seemed.

Scrutiny dulled the shine on McCain’s nugget from the north. The crusader against the “bridge to nowhere” actually supported it.

The clean-hands governor ended up the subject of legislative inquiry that found she abused power as governor. The woman who “took on” the oil companies also cries “drill, baby, drill.”

She was Katy Couricked, Tina Feyed, dressed to the nines, wrapped in a kind of campaign bubble-pack lest she break, finally to break loose – or looser – from the McCain campaign’s control. At which point frustrations by Palin allies over her rocky introduction to the public and by McCain backers over the Alaska governor’s unscripted moments spilled out through anonymous quotes in news stories.
 
It’s all a long way from Wasilla, Alaska.

“Holy cow,” said Chuck Heath, her dad, when he got word McCain had chosen his daughter as vice presidential candidate. That pretty much summed up the reaction of the country.

McCain’s bold stroke brought the first woman ever to the Republican ticket, a strongly anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage candidate who was one of the nation’s most popular governors. But she was new to foreign affairs and the full sweep of national issues. She knew more about catching fish, which she once did for a part-time living, than about most of the policies in play.

But she was not a complete surprise to the political class. Democratic operatives had her on their radar screen for several months. She made them a bit nervous.

“She’s exactly who I need,” McCain said in introducing her. “She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.”

Said Palin: “I didn’t get into government to do the safe and easy things. A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why the ship is built.”

Out she sailed into the gale.

Palin has done the star turn at Republican rallies since her auspicious speaking debut at the Minnesota convention. She’s been Democrat Barack Obama’s most biting critic on the stump, a man she claimed – without factual basis – was “palling around with terrorists.”

Social conservatives, lukewarm about McCain, came on side with her selection and finally showed enthusiasm for the fray. This, as Palin’s popularity fell among Americans at large. After her fumbling interview with Katie Couric, the rap against her hardened that she was unqualified to step in to the presidency if needed.

Alaska’s first female governor arrived at the state Capitol in 2006 on an ethics reform platform after defeating two former governors in the primary and general elections. Her prior political experience consisted of terms as Wasilla’s mayor and councilwoman and a stint as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
 
In the primary, Palin defeated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski, who also had 22 years of experience in the U.S. Senate.

Her task didn’t seem any easier in the general election, but she handily beat Tony Knowles, a popular Democrat who had served two earlier terms as governor.

During her first year in office, Palin moved away from the powerful old guard of the state Republican Party and presided over a tax increase on oil company profits that now has the state’s treasury swelling.

But she is a bullish proponent of petroleum development, in tune with McCain, although the two disagree on drilling in Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She favors drilling there; he opposes it.
 
The governor also opposed designating polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, fearing that step would threaten offshore drilling.

She came into office preaching reform at a time when a federal corruption investigation dogged a number of Alaska’s Republican elected officials. One such powerhouse, Sen. Ted Stevens, was convicted in the week before the presidential election on seven counts of trying to hide more than $250,000 in free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor.
 
To rid the Capitol of the appearance of undue influence, she kept lobbyists out of her office. And after two years as governor, her popularity reached 80 percent in approval ratings.

Still, she was shadowed through the presidential campaign by an inquiry that found she violated state ethics laws by letting a family dispute influence her decision-making as governor. Specifically, she had fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner after she and her husband Todd had pressed him to dismiss her former brother-in-law as a state trooper.

Palin still makes her home in Wasilla, a town of 6,500 about 30 miles north of Anchorage, with her husband, a blue-collar North Slope oil worker who four times has won the Iron Dog, a 1,900-mile snow machine race. He is part Yup’ik Eskimo. The two used to spend summers fishing commercially for salmon, an enterprise that once left her with broken fingers.

The two met at a high school basketball game and they eloped in 1988, six years after graduation, to avoid the cost of a wedding.

“We had a bad fishing year that year, so we didn’t have any money,” Todd Palin told The Associated Press last year. “So we decided to spend 35 bucks and go down to the courthouse.” They have five children.

Even before McCain picked Palin, people outside Alaska were beginning to notice the young governor with the bright smile – runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest – whose good looks spawned a bumper sticker that read: “Coldest State. Hottest Governor.” In December, she posed for the fashion magazine Vogue but says she declined to don runway attire.

“At first they had me in a bunch of furs,” she said of the photo shoot. “Yeah, I have furs on my wall, but I don’t wear furs. I had to show them my bunny boots and my North Face clothing.”

She did the photo shoot while just a few months pregnant, which the public did not know.

What she knew and others didn’t at the time was that her son, Trig, would be born with Down syndrome. There was never a doubt that she and Todd would have the child, she told the AP earlier this year.

“We’ve both been very vocal about being pro life,” Palin said. “We understand that every innocent life has wonderful potential.”

Trig Paxson Van Palin (in homage to the rock band Van Halen) was born in April. With Trig in tow, Palin returned to work a few days later, for a meeting of her energy team. Trig and siblings were by the Palins’ side or in their arms at the convention and many campaign events since.
 
Along the way, she proved a more divisive figure than McCain might have hoped – turning off many moderate independents and apparently failing to draw those who supported Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the other woman of history in Campaign ‘08, in the primaries.

But she developed a following among social conservatives – as McCain needed. And as she will, too, if she hears the call to run, baby, run, another time.

WASHINGTON – If Joe Biden becomes vice president, expect to hear variations of this from his boss every now and then: What Joe meant to say was …

The Delaware senator has played to type in the campaign. He was charming when it most counted, in his debate with Sarah Palin. He was an agile advocate of policy on the stump, with a grounding in foreign and domestic affairs honed over more than three decades in politics.

With a sharp tongue, he took the fight to Republican presidential nominee John McCain, as vice presidential picks are often expected to do. “John McClain,” he called his old friend across the political divide, muddling his name to make the point that the McCain he once knew had become someone else.
 
And yes, Biden put his foot in his mouth more than once. It was always a question of when, not if.

“Rhetorical flourishes,” was Barack Obama’s polite way of saying his running mate has a tendency to drift off the script.

Biden asserted that Franklin Roosevelt comforted Americans on television before TV was invented. He tried to make common cause with gun owners in Virginia coal country by saying of Obama, “He tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.” And he made a precautionary landing of his helicopter in an Afghan snowstorm sound like an encounter with terrorists.
 
That’s just Joe, his colleagues would tell you. But Obama himself had to step in, gently, when Biden told supporters that America’s foes would generate a crisis to test Obama in the first six months of his presidency.

“I think that his core point was that the next administration is going to be tested regardless of who it is,” Obama said, by way of translating Bidenspeak. “I think that Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes.”

Collegial yet ideological, the Delaware senator brought a wealth of foreign policy experience to Obama’s Democratic ticket, plus wisdom in the ways of Washington and an infectious enthusiasm for political donnybrooks.

Back in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., Biden’s Catholic schoolmates nicknamed him Dash because he stuttered so much his speech sounded like Morse Code. Biden overcame that rip at his confidence, smoothed his talk and doesn’t seem to have quieted down since.

He came to Washington as a wunderkind, elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29 – the earliest possible age – and just meeting the rule that one must be 30 when sworn in. The knock against him used to be that he was more sizzle than steak, articulate but perhaps not all that deep.

At age 65, as a party elder and veteran of titanic judicial nomination struggles, world crises and legislative dealmaking, that rap has faded.

His hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are historical soliloquies on the fly, complete with grace notes liberally dispensed to colleagues and witnesses of any political persuasion, humor often directed at himself and plenty of fulmination over what he sees as the failures of the Bush administration.

His first presidential campaign, in 1987, was a “train wreck” by his own description, one of those times that forced him to pick up pieces and start anew.

He’d lifted lines from a British politician, exaggerated his academic achievements when boasting about his smarts to a voter who challenged him (”I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden recalls saying) and suffered horrendous headaches that turned out to be caused by life-threatening brain aneurisms that kept him out of the Senate for seven months.

“In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate,” he writes in his memoirs. And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes – not even close.
      —
On Dec. 18, 1972, five weeks after Biden was elected to the Senate, his wife Neilia, infant daughter Naomi and sons Beau and Hunt were out in the family station wagon getting a Christmas tree when a tractor-trailer broad-sided them.

Down in Washington, Sen.-elect Biden was using Sen. Robert Byrd’s spacious office that day – his own first office was so small that anyone inside it had to stand up and move to let the door open. Biden’s sister Val took the phone call.

“There’s been a slight accident,” she said, chalk white.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Biden recalls saying, meaning his wife.

Neilia and Naomi died in the crash. The boys were critically injured. Biden said he did not find this out for sure until he flew to Delaware and arrived at the hospital.

Biden came to understand how suicide could be seen not just as an option “but a rational option.”

He devoted himself to the care of his sons – ages 2 and 3 at the time – and was sworn in at the bedside of one of them. Both recovered fully, growing up to become lawyers.

As a single father, Biden committed himself to the Delaware tradition of its U.S. senators coming home every night. A 100-mile trip by road, his commute is by Amtrak, and he’s been a fixture on the morning and night trains for all these years.

He still will not work on Dec. 18, the date of the accident.

In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have a grown daughter, Ashley.

Biden does not talk often of the tragedy but decades later, anything to do with the welfare of his children still rankles – and explains perhaps his sharpest rebuke of Obama as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton in this year’s primary campaign.

Capt. Beau Biden, a member of the Delaware National Guard and the state’s attorney general, had been preparing for deployment to Iraq, and it did not sit well with his father that Obama and Clinton had at times voted against money for the war.

“There’s no political point worth my son’s life,” Biden snapped. “There’s no political point worth anybody’s life out there. None.”

Beau Biden left in early October for training in Texas and deployment to Iraq with the 261st Signal Brigade. His dad spoke at the brigade’s departure from Delaware – briefly. He told the audience his had advised him: “Dad, keep it short. We’re in formation.”
      —
Biden led Judiciary Committee proceedings in the explosive debates that rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 and approved Clarence Thomas in 1991.

He earned the ire of conservative activists in the Bork hearings, only to be criticized by liberals later for sending the Thomas nomination to the Senate floor without, in their view, fully investigating Anita Hill’s allegations of misbehavior by Thomas.

Reflecting on the Thomas-Hill hearings, Biden said personalaccusations should be handled in closed sessions. “We could have the Lord Almighty be nominated and someone in this country will communicate to the committee something negative about that person.”

Biden counted a law to protect women from violence and his push to end genocide in the Balkans as the two matters that redeemed the lost promise of his first presidential campaign.
      —
Biden’s second presidential campaign faltered early on; he was just one of the Democrats shunted to the sidelines as the bracing contest between Obama and Clinton dominated everything. He dropped out after finishing poorly in Iowa, the opening contest.

He proved to be a cheerful campaigner who mixed easily with voters, got along with rivals and displayed a self-deprecating humor that leavened debates and speeches.

When the longwinded senator was asked if he could reassure voters he had the discipline needed on the world stage, he drew laughs with a rare one-word answer: “Yes.”

When they were still rivals, Obama jumped in to defend the Delaware senator on another occasion, when Biden was asked if he had a problem with minorities. The question was rooted in Biden’s occasional gaffes. He had apologized earlier for describing Obama as “articulate” and “clean” in one unguarded episode that was taken by some to have a racial overtone.

And he’d had to defend his remark that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
 
Biden’s high-pressure act in the general campaign was his debate with Palin, which required him to be neither hostile nor condescending to the Alaska governor and national policy neophyte. By all but the most partisan accounts, he succeeded on that score and no translation was required from the boss.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Senator Joe Biden will return to North Carolina Thursday and will hold Change We Need Rallies in the Charlotte area, Winston-Salem and Raleigh. 

Biden was last in North Carolina on Sept. 27, when he appeared in Greensboro with Senator Barack Obama. 

Details of the Charlotte visit have not been announced.

Winston-Salem
Wake Forest University
Hearn Plaza outside of Reynolda Hall
2240 Reynolda Rd
Winston-Salem, NC  27106

Doors Open: 12:15pm
Program Begins: 2:15pm

Raleigh
Meredith College
McIver Amphitheater
3800 Hillsborough,
Raleigh, NC 27607

Doors Open: 5 p.m.
Program Begins: 7 p.m.

The events are free and open to the public.  Tickets are NOT required, but an RSVP is strongly encouraged. Members of the public are invited to RSVP at www.nc.barackobama.com.  Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

CLEVELAND – Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says she’s disappointed that the federal government needed to bail out another financial institution.

The Federal Reserve is giving a two-year, $85 billion loan to American International Group Inc., in exchange for a nearly 80 percent stake in the insurer, after it lost billions in the risky business of insuring against bond defaults.

“The shot that has been called by the Feds – it’s understandable but very, very disappointing that taxpayers are called upon for another one,” Palin said during a visit to a downtown deli Wednesday. She shook hands with police officers and business people.

She and her husband Todd sat down for a cup of coffee and chatted briefly some patrons.

LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. – John McCain and Sarah Palin are attacking Barack Obama over the amount of money he’s requested as senator for his home state of Illinois.

At a rally in Missouri, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate accused Obama of requesting nearly $1 billion in federal earmarks during his time in the Senate.
 
The comments follow Obama’s criticism of Palin on the same matter over the weekend. He accused her of making stuff up by claiming to be against earmarks. Today, the Alaska governor said she was surprised he would raise the subject, saying, “I thought he wouldn’t want to go there.”

Obama hasn’t asked for any earmarks this year, and last year requested $311 million worth for Illinois.
 
Under Palin’s leadership, Alaska has asked Washington for 10 times the amount per citizen for pet projects as Obama has sought for his state.

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin cast herself as an outsider and took a swipe at Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday in what was the most anticipated speech of the Republican National Convention. She pledged that as John McCain’s running mate, she wanted to go to Washington not to seek the media’s approval but “to serve the people of this country.”

Depicting herself as “just your average hockey mom,” Palin described her political career as mayor of her small town before her election as governor.

“Since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves,” Palin said in excerpts of her remarks, released in advance of her appearance. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a `community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Palin didn’t mention Obama by name but her target was obvious: Obama began his political life as a community organizer.

Palin also said she was not part of the permanent “Washington elite.” She said some in the media think that makes her unqualified.

“Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of the country,” Palin said.

The speech was the first-term Alaska governor’s first chance to fully introduce and define herself to the American public.
  
“Here’s how I look at the choice Americans face in this election,” she said. “In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.” It was another indirect dig at the Democratic presidential nominee.

In what was clearly the most important speech in her life, Palin went over her experience as a public servant. “I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better,” she said.

“When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too,” she said.
 
In the excerpts released by the McCain campaign, Palin emphasized energy policy, one of her areas of expertise.

“Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will notsolve all of America’s energy problems – as if we all didn’t know that already. But the fact that drilling won’t solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all,” she said.

Palin has been an aggressive advocate for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while McCain opposes drilling there. That difference was not touched on in the excerpts.

Palin said that in a McCain-Palin administration “we’re going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources. We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.

ST. PAUL, Minn .— Given the amount of enthusiasm on the convention floor where John McCain will accept the Republican nomination tonight, you’d never know this election is likely to be the toughest for the party in years. 

Souring economic trends combined with dissatisfaction with President Bush will make it exceptionally difficult for Republicans to keep the White House and gain seats in Congress, political analysts say.

“It’s obviously not a good year for Republicans, not in this climate,” said Andy Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University.  “You’ve got a Republican president with an approval rating of less than 30 percent and the country wants change.”

Still, the hard core Republicans gathered in St. Paul this week are anything but pessimistic – at least publicly. Delegates say there are three reasons for their optimism. 

First, of all the candidates who sought the GOP nomination, no one positioned himself as a party outsider more than McCain.  That will help attract independents, they say, in a year when a more traditional candidate would almost certainly lose. 

Second, the party’s conservative base, which was crucial to both of Bush’s victories, has been slow to warm to the Arizona senator. But his selection of conservative, pro-life Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate seems to have changed that, and delegates hope energy from that key voting block will put McCain over the top. 

And third, they say, Palin’s appeal to women voters — including some former supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton — could be extremely important.

“This is an exciting moment for women, certainly, that we have a lady at the top of the ticket and that will help,” said Valerie White, a delegate from Asheboro, N.C.  

Amongst delegates, there is near universal agreement with an assessment of the race that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis offered South Carolina Republicans at a breakfast meeting earlier this week.

“With the excitement and the message and the commitment that we will show the American public when John and Cindy (McCain) and Gov. Palin leave the convention Thursday night, we’re going to be ahead, we’re not looking back and we’re going to win in November,” Davis said, to thunderous applause.

Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University in South Carolina, says that though the tide is running against Republicans this year, they could yet pull out a win.

The potential impact of racism on the election — a new, largely unpredictable factor brought on by Barack Obama’s historic candidacy as the first black man to be nominated for president by a major party – could end up tipping the election to the GOP, he said. 

But a win is anything but guaranteed.

“I’m not sure the Republicans should be quite as optimistic as they seem to be at the convention,” he said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has asked the state’s personnel board to review allegations that she improperly ordered the firing of the former public safety commissioner.
 
The move, which her office announced Tuesday, aims to blunt a probe already ordered by the state legislature. Palin is accused of firing Walt Monegan for failing to dismiss a trooper who went through a messy divorce with Palin’s sister before she was governor.

In July, the legislature launched a $100,000 investigation into whether Palin abused her power in firing Monegan. The Alaska attorney general’s office hired Anchorage attorney Thomas Van Flein to represent Palin and members of her staff in this investigation.
 
The new filing was accompanied by a 13-page accounting of Palin’s version of the events, denying any abuse of power. Palin’s attorney has long contended that the investigation belonged in the personnel system and not the legislature.

“We fully welcome a fair inquiry into these allegations, and believe that the Personnel Board is statutorily mandated to oversee these proceedings,” Stephen Branchflower, Palin’s attorney said in a letter Monday.

Neither Van Flein nor state Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat heading the state probe, could be immediately reached for comment Tuesday. But earlier, in a letter to Van Flein, French said the Personnel Board oversees complaints brought against the governor under the state’s ethics laws.

“While the Board may be engaged now in investigating an ethics complaint, that process is held confidential until the Board makes a finding of probable cause,” he wrote.
 
Van Flein is representing Palin both personally and in her official capacity as governor.

Van Flein, who also previously represented the Palin family in another matter, said there was no conflict of interest in the dual representation arrangement. Van Flein is permitted to bill the state up to $95,000 for work in the current case.

Van Flein saw no problem with the arrangement. “Our representation is dual but the billing is not,” Van Flein said before Palin’s legal filing was disclosed Tuesday evening. “Matters involving a personal issue will not – and have not – been billed in the government contract.”

Van Flein said that prior to his hiring by the state’s Department of Law on Aug. 21, “We represented the governor and her husband privately.” He declined to provide further details on that matter.

The attorney said he doesn’t know whether Palin suggested to the Alaska Department of Law that it hire him and said he bid for the work. Van Flein and another lawyer in his firm are billing the state $185 an hour under the contract.

Lawyers aren’t prohibited from such dual representation, but it could cause more than just billing headaches.

In representing the governor’s office, Van Flein’s allegiance is to the office itself, not to Palin personally. Depending on where the investigation leads, that could put him in a difficult situation if Palin’s interests and the interests of the public office diverge.

David Jones, an assistant state attorney in Alaska, said the law department conducted a limited competitive solicitation that adhered to state law. Jones said the department contacted four lawyers and received two responses, from Van Flein and another attorney who proposed an hourly rate $142 more than Van Flein’s firm.

A senior McCain adviser, Tucker Eskew, said the law firm’s hiring was part of a “weeks-old effort to provide this governor defense in a series of outlandish politically motivated charges” that were unrelated to the presidential campaign.
  
The investigation will be conducted by a state-hired investigator working for a Republican-dominated legislative committee.