Six months ago, embarking on the vice presidency, Joe Biden listed among his top priorities "restoring" the office to its proper constitutional role after of the eight-year tenure of predecessor Dick Cheney.

It's early to attempt a reliable assessment of his achievement of that goal. But at the half-year mark, he has from all appearances made a good start, if only because nobody is suggesting, as often was the case with Cheney, that Biden is really running the country.

Nor has there been talk of the vice president stealthily at work from an "undisclosed location," whispering conspiratorially into the ear of the president. That was a common image cooked up by Cheney's critics with, as we eventually found out, some validity.

For openers, there have been no contentions from the vice president's office, buttressed by the Obama administration's Justice Department, that the president as commander-in-chief has unlimited executive powers in wartime. Biden has not been saying Obama can do as he chooses without recourse to congressional approval.

But beyond the perhaps exaggerated caricature of Cheney as George W. Bush's puppet-master, there has been little resemblance in the Biden vice presidency to the autocratic characterization of the office that marked the Cheney years.

In personal style, the contrast is obvious. In place of Cheney's secretive, dour, sometimes scowling manner, Biden has been a relatively open and cheery veep. He still is vulnerable to the occasional quip that has fed the rap against him as a man who speaks before thinking. But that reputation cloaks a serious workhorse who so far has been given critical and sensitive assignments at home and abroad.

An example is Biden's latest mission to Ukraine and Georgia to address and encourage those former Soviet Union states in their pursuit of an independent course from a threatening Russia. His familiarity with their leaders has been an important chip Obama has not hesitated to play even as he has the strong-willed Hillary Clinton running his State Department.

At home, one of Obama's first personnel decisions was to place Biden in charge of a special task force on middle-class America. In it, he oversees administration efforts to meet the needs of a key constituency that was a major target of the Obama-Biden campaign last fall, and critical to its success at the polls. Biden has been comfortably riding that particular political horse ever since.

In the central domestic issues of the first six months of the new administration — economic recovery and health-care reform — Biden has been in the forefront of both sales efforts. His resume as well as his personality make him a logical missionary to the middle-class.

From what can be gleaned from outside the tent, the Obama-Biden relationship is far from the perception of the Bush-Cheney duo of a brash but uninformed top man with a seasoned and emotionless Rasputin lurking at his side.

Obama by contrast already combines cool and intellect at the top and Biden so far has fallen in behind as a ready and willing subordinate, though with uncommon public presence in a job that too often had been shadowy.

Biden, after 36 years in the Senate and chairman of two of its most important committees, Judiciary and Foreign Relations, has eased comfortably to date into his new role. He said before he agreed to be Obama's running mate that all he asked was to be in the room when all key decisions were made, and to have a voice. From all appearances, that has happened.

It is, to be sure, still early in the new administration to conclude that the Obama-Biden honeymoon will last. Biden in the past has been criticized as a loose cannon who lacks self-discipline, not unnoticed at times by Obama. But after six months, Joe Biden seems to be making headway toward re-establishing the office as a constructive, not dominant, part of the nation's leadership team.