(Image Credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

Vice President Joe Biden says that President Obama put his job on the line when he authorized the covert raid into Pakistan last year to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

"This guy's got a backbone like a ramrod," Biden told a crowd of campaign donors in Washington, D.C., Monday night.  "He said, 'Go,' knowing his presidency was on the line. Had he failed in that audacious mission, he would've been a one-term president."

Biden's comments come as he and the president's re-election campaign strive to cast the president as a bold and decisive leader, contrasting claims by Republican opponents that he has been feckless on foreign policy and national security.

In a forthcoming Obama campaign documentary on the president's first term, Biden and former President Bill Clinton both reflect on the bin Laden raid, hailing it as a "tough decision."

"He took the harder and more honorable path," Clinton says in an excerpt of "The Road We've Traveled" released Monday.  "When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, 'I hope that's the call  I would have made.'"

Biden spoke about the president's record during an evening campaign fundraiser at the Georgetown home of Sen. John Kerry, where 87 guests paid $10,000-per-couple to dine on New York strip steaks and white truffle mashed potatoes, according to a pool reporter on the scene.

Ratcheting up his rhetoric on the Republican presidential field, Biden called Obama "the real deal" and said his rivals on the campaign trail are out of touch.

"These guys don't have a sense of the average folks out there," he said of Republicans. "They don't know what it means to be middle class."

The Republican National Committee noted in an email Tuesday that Biden's hobnobbing at the "ritzy fundraiser" with wealthy Democratic donors appears hypocritical in light of his claims.

The vice president will deliver his first official public campaign speech at a United Auto Workers office Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday.

He's expected to focus on Obama's support for the 2009 auto bailout, drawing contrasts with GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney who opposed the plan.