Six months ago, embarking on the vice presidency, Joe Biden listed among his top priorities "restoring" the office to its proper constitutional role in the wake of the eight-year tenure of predecessor Dick Cheney.
It's early to attempt a reliable assessment of his achievement of that goal. But at the half-year mark, he has from all appearances made a good start, if only because nobody is suggesting, as often was the case with Mr. Cheney, that Mr. Biden is really running the country.
Nor has there has been talk of the vice president stealthily at work from an "undisclosed location," whispering conspiratorially into the ear of the president. That was a common image cooked up by Mr. Cheney's critics with, as we eventually found out, some validity.
For openers, there have been no contentions from the vice president's office, buttressed by the Obama administration's Justice Department, that the president as commander-in-chief has unlimited executive powers in wartime. Mr. Biden has not been saying President Barack Obama can do as he chooses without recourse to congressional approval.
But beyond the perhaps exaggerated caricature of Mr. Cheney as George W. Bush's puppet-master, there has been little resemblance in the Biden vice presidency to the autocratic characterization of the office that marked the Cheney years.
In personal style, the contrast is obvious. In place of Mr. Cheney's secretive, dour, sometimes scowling manner, Mr. Biden has been a relatively open and cheery veep. He still is vulnerable to the occasional quip that has fed the rap against him as a man who speaks before thinking.
But that reputation cloaks a serious workhorse who has been given critical and sensitive assignments at home and abroad. They include undertakings of sensitive diplomacy that seldom if ever were entrusted by Mr. Bush to Mr. Cheney.
An example is Mr. Biden's latest mission to Ukraine and Georgia to address and encourage those former Soviet Union states in their pursuit of an independent course from a threatening Russia. His familiarity with their leaders has been an important chip Mr. Obama has not hesitated to play even as he has the strong-willed Hillary Clinton running his State Department.
At home, one of Mr. Obama's first personnel decisions was to place Mr. Biden in charge of a special task force on middle-class America. He is charged to oversee administration efforts to meet the needs of a key constituency that was a major target of the Obama-Biden campaign and critical to its success at the polls. Mr. Biden has been comfortably riding that particular political horse ever since.
