‘Amtrak Joe’ No More

Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

THE MAD DASH For years, Joseph R. Biden Jr. has commuted from Delaware to Washington.

By JULIE BOSMAN

NINE days after the election, in a motorcade zipping through the diagonal streets of downtown Washington, Jill Biden sat next to her husband, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., peering out the window and scoping out her soon-to-be home city.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

ROOM TO SPARE The official residence at the Naval Observatory.

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William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

HOME SWEET HOME A policeman standing guard outside Mr. Biden’s home in Delaware in August.

“What building is that?” she asked, pointing out an unfamiliar structure in Judiciary Square, recalled Ted Kaufman, Mr. Biden’s longtime adviser and close friend, who was in the car.

Her husband, the consummate Washington insider, was stumped. “Neither of us knew what it was,” Mr. Kaufman said.

Perhaps that’s because Mr. Biden, like his wife, has never lived in Washington, despite serving in the Senate for 36 years.

Not since Jacob K. Javits took near-daily flights back to New York City (mostly to please his wife, Marian, who refused to leave Manhattan) have a senator’s commuting habits been so carefully documented. But Mr. Biden’s nightly 90-minute Amtrak rides to Wilmington, Del., will grind to a halt in January, when he and Dr. Biden, an English professor, take up residence at No. 1 Observatory Circle, on the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory, the official home of vice presidents since 1974.

Mr. Biden will be the first vice president to move into the residence without previously living in Washington, said Donald Ritchie, a Senate historian.

For the Bidens, the move will bring a drastic change in habit. Mr. Biden, 66, will abandon his long-cherished routine that cemented his reputation as “Amtrak Joe,” an average guy who rushes to make the train home to spend time with his kids. Dr. Biden, 57, will almost certainly surrender her job at Delaware Technical and Community College.

In Delaware, they live in a 10-year-old lakeside home in the aptly named suburb of Greenville, outside Wilmington, a house that Mr. Biden personally designed.

In Washington, they will inhabit a 115-year-old Victorian with 33 rooms on a heavily guarded circular lot, next to the British Embassy.

The Bidens and their aides declined to discuss their plans or the question of whether Dr. Biden would find a new job in Washington. But friends and colleagues said that in all the decades Mr. Biden worked in Washington, he never had much of a social life there. He rarely stuck around for an evening fund-raiser or a cocktail party. He was not a regular at typical lawmaker haunts like the Capital Grille or Charlie Palmer, instead inviting people to the Senate dining room if he happened to be in town for dinner.

“I think he was far more interested in his children than the social whirl,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a longtime Biden friend. “I have to kid him a little bit, because he’s no longer going to be asking, ‘Are we going to finish this vote by 7:45?’ so he can make this mad dash to the train.”

Not that Mr. Biden will suddenly become a fixture at Washington dinner parties, predicted Mr. Leahy, who in his 34 years in the Senate has seen a few new administrations come to town. “Everybody loves to have the vice president over for dinner, and he’ll have 100 invitations piling up,” Mr. Leahy said. “But I think he can be very valuable to President Obama up on the Hill. That will be the most important place to be.”

Sally Quinn, the journalist and author, said that like the Obamas, who have spent little time in Washington, the Bidens will be social newcomers.

“I’ve never seen Joe Biden at a party in Washington,” Ms. Quinn said. “Both of those couples are going to be fresh faces, even though they’ve both been in the Senate and Biden’s been here for a hundred years. It’ll be very interesting to have them around.”

Mr. Kaufman, who has been a close Biden friend since the 1970s, said Mr. Biden was damaged politically by his absence on the social scene.

“He did not participate in it,” Mr. Kaufman said. “To be honest, it was a real hindrance, because when he ran for president in ’87, people didn’t know him. You could probably count on two hands the number of embassy functions he went to.”

That could change in January, if he and Dr. Biden make time to sample the city’s Italian restaurants (their favorite cuisine) or visit the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue instead of traveling to New York to see a show (their regular practice until now).

Or they could take in performances at the Kennedy Center, a place Mr. Biden was rarely spotted at when he was a senator, said John Dow, a spokesman for the Kennedy Center.

If the Bidens stay closer to home, they will be surrounded by familiar faces in their new neighborhood on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington. Hunter Biden, one of Mr. Biden’s sons, lives a mile and a half from the Naval Observatory with his wife and their three daughters. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lives around the corner in a five-bedroom brick Colonial on Whitehaven Street. They may also bring Mr. Biden’s 91-year-old mother, Jean, to live with them, as she does in Delaware.

Dr. Biden, who runs five miles a day, five days a week, will enjoy close proximity to the trails winding through Rock Creek Park, close to the Naval Observatory. (She will be closely trailed by athletic Secret Service agents.)

And the Bidens are expected to keep their home in Greenville, which Dr. Biden has said they will never sell. “In D.C., we’re so close that I would be lucky enough that we could take advantage of both places,” she recently told The News Journal, a Wilmington paper.

If Dr. Biden decides to continue working, she would be one of the few vice-presidential spouses to do so. Lynne Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and wrote several books during the Bush administration. Lady Bird Johnson supervised her Texas broadcasting company while her husband served as vice president. But most other second ladies have devoted themselves to volunteer work and ceremonial duties on behalf of their husbands.

If she chooses to work, Dr. Biden’s chosen profession is unlikely to raise any red flags. “It’s almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of conflict there could be with a teacher,” said Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.

An official at one Washington college said she hoped that Dr. Biden would come looking for a job there. “We would love it,” said Elizabeth Homan, a spokeswoman for Montgomery College, one of the largest community colleges in the Washington area. “I think it would be a really pleasant surprise.”

Officials at Amtrak, however, were less enthusiastic about losing their high-profile customer.

“We will miss having Senator Biden as a regular passenger,” said Karina Romero, an Amtrak spokeswoman.

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Rolle Wins Rhodes Scholarship

By PETE THAMEL

Florida State safety Myron Rolle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship Saturday. He is the first major-college football player of his generation to win what is considered the world’s most prestigious postgraduate academic scholarship.

He became the most prominent student-athlete to win the award since Bill Bradley at Princeton in 1965. Bradley was later a Knicks star, a senator and a presidential candidate. Other winners have included Pat Haden (U.S.C. and the Rams) and Tom McMillen (Maryland and the N.B.A. and Congress).

Rolle’s quest to the win the Rhodes had received heavy attention from the news media because he chose to risk missing all or part of Florida State’s pivotal game at Maryland on Saturday night to have the interview, which took place in Birmingham, Ala.

Rolle received the news about 5 p.m.; he then received a police escort to a local airport, where a private plane waited to take him to the game. He entered the game late in the second quarter of a 37-3 victory. “He is flying high,” Sally Karioth, a Florida State nursing professor who accompanied Rolle to his interview, said before the game. “He was hopping. He’s usually real sedate.”

Rolle was one of two winners selected from 13 finalists interviewed in Birmingham. Parker Goyer, a former player on the women’s tennis team at Duke, was the other winner.

Rolle is in his final football season at Florida State and now faces a difficult decision. He will have to choose between perhaps playing in the N.F.L. next year and studying at Oxford. His planned course of study would be a one-year master’s degree in medical anthropology; he plans to become a doctor and open a clinic to help needy people in the Bahamas. Rolle has said that if he wins the award, he will make a decision with his family when things settle down.

“I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if he heads off to Oxford in October,” Karioth said of Rolle. “He’s really an academic. There aren’t a lot of Renaissance kids out there. He really is.”

Rolle has long stood out at Florida State. He was the country’s top recruit, started as a freshman and has had an all-American-caliber junior year in 2008.

Along with graduating in two and a half years with a 3.75 grade point average in pre-med, Rolle was awarded a $4,000 grant to conduct cancer research and set up a program in Okeechobee, Fla., to teach Seminole Indian children about health and physical fitness.

“It’s a fantastic accomplishment on his part,” Garrett Johnson, a former Florida State shot-put champion and 2006 Rhodes winner, said in a telephone interview Saturday. “I always thought he was a deserving candidate, but I was a bit biased.”

Rolle’s victory is also considered a major boost for a Florida State athletic department that has been an academic punch line for the past year. A cheating scandal affected the eligibility of 60 athletes, resulting in three firings and a self-imposed probation. “Having two student-athletes win speaks very highly of the caliber of athlete we have at Florida State,” Johnson said. “We are representative of a vast majority of the student-athletes at Florida State. It’s great to project that on a national stage.”

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Why Detroit Can't Keep Up

By Bernard Avishai

It has become conventional wisdom that the reeling U.S. auto industry desperately needs to innovate. The hard part for Detroit is working out how.

There is hope, even for an entrenched, sprawling company such as General Motors. We don't need Michael Moore to imagine the misery that would be unleashed if GM were to go under. But before we spend more taxpayer money bailing anyone out, let's recognize that Detroit's worst failure is a recent one, not the long-gone blunder of betting that SUVs were the future.

The real problem is failing to stay competitive with global rivals in the realm of advanced principles of design and manufacturing -- principles that exploit global, peer-to-peer information platforms to increase the variety of smash hits a firm might produce. While Volkswagen, Toyota and Renault-Nissan have used these platforms to build flexibility and beauty into their product lines, positioning themselves for long-term profitability, GM and Ford have played catch-up on manufacturing "quality" -- in effect using the proceeds from SUV sales to fight the last war.

What's the next one? The key to making any manufactured product profitable these days is lowering the transactional costs of designing it. Look at Sony or Samsung or Apple or Honda. What these companies (really, groups of companies) have cultivated is the capacity to experiment. Product teams within each group design prototypes that will appeal to their niche customers. Company leaders then dump the likely losers, batting for singles and the odd home run. (Apple, remember, had no idea that the iPod would be a grand slam.) The point is, you don't want that much riding on each try. You want (if you'll pardon more sports metaphors) to transform your design-to-manufacturing paradigm from football to basketball -- that is, to set yourself up to rush the basket many times per game, not painfully drive your way toward the end zone just a few times.

Pulling this off in auto groups such as GM does not mean (except in special cases such as Chevrolet's much-hyped plug-in car, the Volt) a design program driven from the top. It means having product teams within every brand unit share data about customers, technical specifications on components, relationships with suppliers and so forth with their peers in every other unit. You want design and production managers in each unit to be able to gain access quickly to cutting-edge components developed throughout the group -- and find new ways to integrate them into new products. Notice how parts of today's Lexus migrate into tomorrow's Camry. This is not the same as such Detroit tactics as, say, repackaging the German-engineered Opel and calling it a Saturn.

Take Skoda, the Czech auto manufacturer (slogan: "Simply Clever"), which in 1991 became a part of the Volkswagen Group, the largest car manufacturer in Europe. Skoda is thriving today because its elegance-minded Bohemian designers have learned to exploit the access VW management has given them to virtually the entire spectrum of the conglomerate's components.

At first, Skoda also simply put a Czech skin around the German-engineered Golf. But today, the company creates original cars for low-end, low-tech markets whose boundaries are carefully negotiated with other VW Group members (it reportedly exports 80 percent of its vehicles to 92 countries). Skoda's former CEO, Detlef Wittig, told me that his firm's latest model, the adorable Roomster, would break even after selling only 60,000 units a year. He said that Skoda now accounts for about 20 percent of VW Group profits. (In case you're wondering: Yes, the Roomster may take some customers away from the VW brand, but the VW Group as a whole will be better off for it. And no, Skoda's competitive advantage is not cheap labor: Czech labor is no cheaper than South Korean.)

Skoda is a stirring example. But all global automotive groups need to decentralize their vehicle design this way: empowering interconnected product teams to integrate components, information, code and so forth. Innovation won't spring from a CEO mandate to invent something radically new. The goal should be to introduce new models in ever shorter development cycles (to be competitive these days, car makers have to roll them out in less than 36 months) and to break even on ever smaller production runs -- say, 50,000 vehicles, which is less than a third of the U.S. standard on genuinely new models. Sharing components means that suppliers will have to find new ways to achieve economies of scale and plant managers will have to learn assembly operations from one another. Would Ford be in crisis today if its designers worldwide had had access years ago to Volvo and Mazda engineering and parts?

Innovation is mainly a matter of integration. These "modular" principles have been true for consumer electronics for years; car companies are simply getting up to speed. In fact, this set of principles applies to pretty much every high-tech product and every high-tech manufacturing process that produces a low-tech product. It applies to delivering professional and financial services. Peer-to-peer networks have changed the rules. Nobody is as smart as everybody.

Washington cannot save GM and Ford by handing them money and waiting for them to produce (or even demanding that they produce) an advanced hybrid. You can't order up innovation; you have to empower entrepreneurial teams to assemble delight, piece by piece, for specific customers. The Volt will need to be a part of a family of cars for GM to succeed. The Volt's key power-train components should quickly be absorbed into an environment-friendly Saab, for instance, or into some California-style sports car built around an iPhone. Even the coolest of these models will face stiff competition from global rivals, so they had better be made right.

Government -- or, more precisely, governments -- can help only if they grasp the way manufacturing companies work. The shakiest firms will need a tariff regime that permits an auto group to import components from the country where they are designed or most competitively produced. (The European Union's trade rules were a huge help in making it possible for Skoda to acquire components from VW Group companies, including the Spanish firm SEAT.) Federal and state governments should help jump-start a grid for electric cars, as Israel is doing. Most important, perhaps, Washington should move to stimulate innovation in entrepreneurial companies along the whole supply chain -- companies aspiring to provide new generations of components.

In particular, Washington should make patent protection harder to come by lest big companies become complacent and would-be competitors get stifled. In much the same way that the U.S. government is now taking stakes in banks that it's bailing out, it should also take stakes in car companies it invests in (remember, the German state of Lower Saxony still owns about 20 percent of Volkswagen).

Washington should also work with Detroit's management to make critical R&D programs (for batteries, fuel cells and so on) more transparent and less vulnerable to battles over intellectual property -- which would let university labs and freelance inventors join in the quest to innovate. Washington should encourage supplier companies to find new ways to share intellectual property, such as global ideas exchanges that apply something similar to copyright rules to unpatented technological innovations. And the United States should create incubators especially tailored for new auto suppliers and offer tax holidays for all new manufacturing businesses.

None of these actions will guarantee that U.S. car companies will use funds from a bailout to create cars that customers will actually want to buy. But think of these measures as the roads and bridges of a knowledge economy. If, after several years, U.S. auto companies don't improve, some of their key assets and manufacturing capacity could be sold to global firms such as Toyota (which is not exactly a Japanese company anymore). Such sales might reinvigorate these plants and suppliers, and they would keep their workers afloat. Of course, entirely new automakers may emerge from among innovative suppliers, as they have in the computer industry.

The question is not whether the U.S. auto industry faces extinction or whether GM is too big to fail. The question is how the healthy parts of Detroit's behemoths might survive into a new generation and in a changing business landscape. The time it takes to generate a new car, like the life span of a company, is only going to get shorter. During the 1980s and '90s, as Arie Lewin of Duke University discovered, it took about 13 years for a third of the Fortune 500 to be "selected out" -- to fail or be acquired by other firms. Today, it takes about four years.

The coming contraction need not spell disaster for Detroit. But we must understand that financial capital isn't the only kind that flows around the world or is managed and regulated. The same is true of intellectual capital -- the sheer capacity to turn learning into stuff. The good news is that the United States still has the world's largest proven reserves of intellectual capital. The bad news is that, unlike oil, the fact that we have it doesn't mean that others do not.

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