He's still the Joe we know -- but now he has an entourage

[gateley]

Biden continues shopping locally, riding the train

Joe Biden is remarkable for his habits. And he's lucky as vice president to hail from a state so close to Washington.

He still gets his hair cut at The Men's Room in Greenville, the same place he's been going for decades, said employee Rich Bianco, a junior high school classmate from St. Helena, a Catholic school in Bellefonte.

"We always talk about old times," Bianco said. "He said he keeps coming here because we have too much on him."

Biden still buys shirts from his favorite Greenville tailor and pops into a Happy Harry's drugstore near his home. But he is under constant guard, no longer able to freelance in restaurants or mug for cameras of Delawareans as he works the crowd at the Italian Festival.

During the interview with The News Journal, an aide said it would be impossible for Biden to slip outside the West Wing for a quick photo without a phalanx of security and schedulers that stifle the sort of creative leaps Biden is famous for and the kind of impromptu remarks that have in the past caused him grief.

At Catholic Mass, Secret Service agents sit two pews behind the vice president, ready to spring into action.

"All kidding aside, I still take the train. I took the train this weekend, up and back," Biden said. "The Secret Service strongly opposed my taking the train when I first got here because it's a harder thing to secure. I said, 'Guys, I'm taking the train, you can either ride with me or not ride with me.'... Dale, who is the head of the Secret Service for the vice president's detail, said, 'May I ask you a question, Mr. Vice President? Does everybody call you Joe?' I said, 'In Delaware and in the train, everybody calls me Joe.'"

During Biden's decades in the Senate, he was a member of the regular "gang" that rode Amtrak conductor Gregg Weaver's train, the first Acela from Wilmington to Washington on weekday mornings. He was "all over the place," Weaver said, walking and winking up and down the aisles. "He was one of the club."

Now his rail trips are highly choreographed, with a prearranged plan for when and where Biden and his entourage will board the train, where they will sit and how the vice president will walk from the train to his car without a lot of people around. Biden and Weaver still find time to chat, to catch up on each other's families. "I can still get through to talk to him because it's my train, but it would be hard for anyone else to get near him," Weaver said. "Now he has to kind of stay in one place, people can't get to him and talk to him like they could

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HOLY COW! I was going to post the entire article, but it's 4 pages long! Here's the link:

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20100228/NEWS02/2280343

[PatSeg]

1. Just as I would have imagined it

Always Joe, no matter what.

[jillan]

2. He is such a great guy.

Just a regular Joe ;)

[PatSeg]

3. That takes a lot of guts

to defy the norm on a regular basis. So few people know what a down to earth guy he is. Oh well, we do!