WASHINGTON -- If there's one thing that everyone can agree on about Vice President Joe Biden, it's that he says exactly what he thinks.
Thanks to a hot mic, America heard him tell President Barack Obama what a "big f**king deal" it was moments before Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. As Obama's running mate in 2008, Biden told a crowd that Hillary Clinton would have been a better pick than he was. Perhaps most famously, he went on NBC's "Meet the Press" and announced that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage -- at a time when Obama was still "evolving" on the issue.
Have these gaffes (or flashes of honesty, if you prefer) put a strain on Biden's relationship with the president over the years? Does Obama wish his vice president would just stick to the damn script and stop screwing up his message? Or does the president accept these moments as Biden being Biden?
In HuffPost's latest segment of Drinking and Talking, which was taped last month, we asked White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer what the Obama-Biden relationship is really like and how the president felt when Biden got out in front of him on gay marriage. It wasn't too bad, apparently.
"He was not that mad," said Pfeiffer, adding, "I mean, everyone was surprised."
"It was a very interesting thing to be a part of it because the president was ready to make his position clear," Pfeiffer said. "That opportunity was not how he would have chosen it, but it was forced on him. He was very glad to have the opportunity to do so."
Pfeiffer said that Obama and Biden have grown "very close personally" and that nobody in the White House has ever thought Biden was intentionally saying things at Obama's expense -- something he suspected has not "ever" been the case with a president and vice president.
"Everyone loves Joe Biden," he said. "For every time you pick one thing where he gets in a little bit of trouble, there's 1,000 times he's gone out and campaigned his tail off. ... He was a huge asset in why we got re-elected, both times."
Biden's unexpected candor on marriage equality also reinforced a broader point that was becoming clear to those in the White House, Pfeiffer said. That is, that there's no reason to regret taking a strong progressive position.
"On the cultural issues, on LGBT equality, like every time we've gone down this path, people have been like, 'The world is going to end. People are going to be really mad,'" he said. "And every time, nothing happened."
Watch the full exchange with Pfeiffer in the video above.
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