On a Sunday afternoon not long after he was elected vice president, Joe Biden recalls, he learned a lesson about his new station in life.

Biden was finishing up a call with his new chief of staff, Ron Klain, when he dropped the news that his friend Ted Kaufman would be filling his Senate seat.

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“Did you tell the president?” asked Klain, who, as an aide to Al Gore, had learned something about vice presidents and their place.

“Why the hell should I tell the president?” Biden remembers thinking. 

After all, for 36 years, Biden had been his own man, rising to the Senate’s upper echelons and answering to no one except the voters of Delaware. But Klain’s question caught him up short — a teaching moment Biden would face on several more occasions, and could again, while working to define his role as vice president and tame an oversize personality and a gift for gaffes.

“It dawned on me that Ron was right,” he said in a recent interview with POLITICO. “What if Ted ended up being a jewel thief? It’s not going to be, ‘Well, Biden ... ’ It’s going to be Barack. He’s going to get the blame.”

He called President Barack Obama with the news about Kaufman. But he acknowledges that his instincts are not yet naturally deferential.

“That’s been the hardest part” of adjusting to his new job, said Biden. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I hope I’m getting better at it. Because I’m confident the other part is really working well. I am really satisfied with and actually excited about my ability to be value-added and to be involved in this.”

Asked by POLITICO for an assessment of his vice president, Obama cited Biden’s candor as the attribute he values most.

“The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me,” the president said in response to questions submitted by POLITICO. “I also know, when he gives me his advice, he gives it to me straight.”

Biden “is always prepared to be the skunk at the family picnic to make sure we are as intellectually honest as possible,” said one senior aide. And that role has been particularly true as the Obama administration has developed its policy on Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the president has committed more resources to Afghanistan, Biden, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a skeptical voice on a military buildup, sources said. While not staking out a position in absolute opposition, the vice president peppers advisers with questions about the timing and size of any new troop buildup and about the public’s tolerance for it.

As for Iraq, Biden was in Baghdad on Tuesday for the third time as vice president, warning Iraqi leaders that “there are a number of steps that need to be taken” before they can take over security there, even if a referendum is passed calling for a swifter U.S. withdrawal. During his meetings, the Green Zone came under fire, but no one in his party was harmed.

On a visit in July, Biden had a similar warning about the security situation, telling the Iraqis that the U.S. would cut back its engagement in the country if it devolved into sectarian violence.

“He read them the riot act, and he had the most credibility of anybody in the administration to do that,” given his attention to Iraq in the Senate, said Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution.

Besides making Biden his point man on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has also given him the assignment of overseeing the results of the economic stimulus bill and moving his domestic agenda in the Senate — three areas that will help define the Obama presidency.