The Hill News

Vice President Biden lauded the Senate's top Republican on Friday, describing him as the key to overcoming gridlock in Congress.

Biden heaped praise on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during a speech on what is very much McConnell's home turf â€" the McConnell Center, at the University of Louisville. Biden was speaking as part of the center's spring lecture series.

"When Democrats recently took a shellacking, as the president said, the pundits went on to predict that with so little bipartisanship and cooperation in the first two years ... that everything would come to a grinding halt," Biden said. "I knew better. Not because I'm smart, but because I knew Mitch."

Biden's trip to Kentucky underscores the emerging working relationship between the top Senate Republican and the vice president, who described himself as "still a Senate man."

The vice president described the work he conducted with McConnell during the ! lame-duck session of Congress, negotiations credited with producing the tax-cut deal that passed the Democratic House and Senate, and which extended expiring tax cuts for another two years.

"I'm happy to say our working relationship is still strong," McConnell said in his introduction to Biden at the university, pointing to that very deal.

Though McConnell remains a leader in the minority, he now has the benefit of a House in Republican hands and a bulked-up conference of 47 members in the Senate. The Kentucky Republican is regarded as a master of Senate rules, and used them often over the past two years to help advance GOP goals. ("Mitch knows how to count better than anyone I've ever known," Biden joked Friday.)

The vice president noted the chasm between Democrats and the Obama administration on spending and the budget, especially with approaching battles on those issues.

But Biden also said he expected that deals would be made! , in part due to McConnell, who has openly said that defeating! Preside nt Obama and Biden in 2012 was his top priority.

"I'm not naive. Just like we were told before the lame-duck started â€" we were told nothing would be done," Biden said. "I don't accept that."