Joe Biden, who vowed on becoming vice president to "restore the balance" of the office after the Dick Cheney reign, has just returned from his third trip to Iraq since he took the job. Rather than secluding himself at "undisclosed locations" as Cheney often did in his eight years as veep, Biden has been a traveling whirling dervish.

His overseas schedule has also included missions to Russia, Georgia and other destinations, and at home he has hit a range of states in his assignment to oversee the economic stimulus and recovery effort. Part of that task has been visiting various cities and states as head of the administration's task force on the middle class.

At the outset, Biden stipulated that he wanted to be a sort of minister without portfolio — without a specific agency or other narrow bureaucratic responsibility. Instead he wanted to be Obama's adviser-in-chief across the broad range of his presidential responsibilities.

The new president readily agreed, but rather than simply lending a receptive ear to his vice president, he has dispatched him hither and yon as his eyes on distant trouble spots, especially Iraq. While the war focus has switched to the Afghan/Pakistan theater, Biden has been charged with monitoring Iraq's struggle toward internal political reconciliation.

On this latest trip, he reassured Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the United States was adhering to the agreement to remove all U.S. combat brigades by the end of next August, and to withdraw all remaining American troops by the end of 2011. But he noted that, should Iraq call for an earlier pullout, the subject of a possible public referendum, the United States would comply.

Biden also discussed with Kurdish authorities the thorny issues of sharing oil revenues and the approaching January elections, for which governing rules are yet to be written into law. In all, because of his frequent previous visits to Iraq as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has been given a particularly major role in dealing with Iraq.

While it may seem to intrude on the responsibilities of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she already has a full plate of other diplomatic challenges and they are in regular communication on Iraq. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod observes that "we're governing in a very difficult time and we've got a lot of challenges. We need more throw-weight in terms of ability to cover ground."

At home, Biden's monitoring of the economic recovery has kept him in touch with governors and mayors across the country and made him the point of appeal on federal money and how it is being used for public works and stimulation of local economies. As head of the middle-class task force, he is charged with assigning goals to Cabinet officers on recovery projects in their jurisdictions.

To cope with an impatient public as well as opposition party criticism, Biden recently made a major speech at the Brookings Institution trumpeting progress at "the nine-mile mark" of "a two-year mara-thon." He noted that only $90 million of the $787 billion recovery fund provided by Congress had yet been spent.

All these activities have made Biden arguably the most visible vice president ever, with more news media coverage for his open activities than any of his predecessors. By contrast, much of Cheney's coverage concerned actions taken in private, and their ramifications for the exercise of executive power. Cheney was much more a hidden hand, especially in advocacy of the concept of "the unitary executive" preaching virtually unlimited presidential power in wartime.

When Obama discussed the vice presidency with Biden, according to Axelrod, there was a "stipulated understanding" that both were "appalled at the degree to which Cheney had exercised what really was executive authority in the office. There was total agreement that the vice president should play a supplementary role and not the primary role."

Within that caveat, however, Biden has had his public presence magnified.

And the man Republicans love to call a gaffe-prone loose cannon has done so with no evidence yet of serious misstep, enhancing both the man and the office in the process.