Biden shushes wife after secretary of State slip to Oprah

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s wife told Oprah Winfrey on Monday that her husband had been offered a choice between being Barack Obama’s running mate or his secretary of State, prompting Biden to try to shush her.

Jill Biden’s comment, during a taping of Winfrey’s television show, was an implicit insult to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the person Obama ultimately named to head the State Department, because it suggested she was not Obama’s first choice.

The comment may have been just the hyperbole of a proud spouse, but it pointed to potential tension in Obama’s administration on the eve of his inauguration: In Biden and Clinton, Obama may have essentially two secretaries of State in his inner circle.

Biden aides say that he was never offered a choice between the two positions, although Obama discussed both jobs with him.

Biden, who has been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has broad expertise in international affairs, had been widely considered a candidate for secretary of State. Both he and Clinton ran against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. In the televised interview with Winfrey, taped before an audience in Washington’s Kennedy Center, Jill Biden said she told her husband that being vice president would be better for the family than being secretary of State.

“If you’re secretary of State, you’ll be away -- we’ll never see you,” she said she had told him. “I’ll see you at a state dinner once in a while.

“But I said, ‘If you are vice president, the entire family . . . can be involved.’ ”

Biden’s aides flatly denied Jill Biden’s assertion that he had been asked to choose between the two top posts.

“Like anyone who followed the presidential campaign this summer, Dr. Jill Biden knew there was a chance that President-elect Obama might ask her husband to serve in some capacity and that, given his background, the positions of vice president and secretary of State were possibilities,” said Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander in a written statement.

“To be clear, President-elect Obama offered Vice President-elect Biden one job only -- to be his running mate. And the vice president-elect was thrilled to accept the offer,” Alexander said.

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janet.hook@latimes.com