For Biden, it's the résumé over the rallying cry

Democratic candidate Joe Biden volunteered at a benefit at a Des Moines restaurant on Thanksgiving. The candidate of passion in 1988, Biden is now emphasizing expertise. (ERIC THAYER/GETTY IMAGES)

MASON CITY, Iowa - As Joe Biden lingered after his speech at Northern Iowa Area Community College, a man leaned in and asked for Biden's ultimate sales pitch - the one thing he could say on caucus night to lure friends from better-funded, more famous candidates to support the senator from Delaware.

Biden uncharacteristically paused for a moment, then characteristically launched into a story, about a moment early in his long senatorial career when a fellow legislator humiliated him during a debate on oil-extraction methods for not knowing what "stripper-well mining" was.

The story's moral, Biden told his supporter, was the key to his appeal. "To convince people you know how to lead, you have to first convince them you know what you're talking about," Biden said.

When Biden first ran for president in 1988 at age 44, he was the Democrats' candidate of passion, an idealist calling upon his generation to seize its moment to change politics - and often dismissed as a lightweight for it. "I was the Barack Obama!" he marveled over mozzarella sticks, spaghetti, and Coke at a Mason City sports bar.

This time, lost in a race centered on the relative merits of experience and vision, Biden is emphasizing a less inspirational quality: expertise. Unlike New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, two other candidates struggling for recognition, Biden does not dwell on the positions he has held or the time he has served. Instead, he turns to constant and conspicuous displays of his knowledge and contacts.

Biden has said he will drop out if he does not finish in the top three in Iowa, where he has so far lagged at about 5 percent in the polls and appears to trail all his rivals in available resources. Yet unlike Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whose Iowa strategies depend largely on motivating new caucusgoers, Biden counts on breaking through to the insular pool of super-serious, middle-age citizens who are the core of the Democratic vote here.

"The caucus participants are well-educated people," said John Marttila, who has advised Biden since his first Senate campaign in 1972. "Well-educated, well-informed: This is the Biden constituency. It's news consumers."

For the past few months, the Iowa airwaves have been filled with Democratic candidates whose outsize personalities and intriguing backgrounds have captivated voters, leaving the famously talkative Biden - who starts airing his first TV ad in Iowa today - fighting to be heard.

In his speeches, Biden swings wildly between high and low, solemn dirge and bombastic crescendo, punctuated with a carnival barker's recurring appeal to "ladies and gentlemen."

Biden refers to the incumbent president as "this guy" and cites earthy wisdom like "It ain't the plan, it's the man," but often closes with a quote from Seamus Heaney - whom he identifies as "my favorite contemporary poet" - about making "hope and history rhyme."

Every few minutes, Biden finds himself speaking with so much bravado that he has to caution his audience to continue taking him seriously. In Mason City, Biden interrupted his own remarks at different points to interject, "I mean it sincerely!" and "That's not an exaggeration" and "I'm not being facetious!" and "Not a joke, not a joke, not a joke," waving his hands back and forth at the last point as though trying to direct a plane to land.

The audience is expected to keep up with a string of knowing references to foreign leaders whose names Biden invokes casually as if referring to buddies from his childhood in Scranton, Pa.

"I know many of these world leaders - most of them by their first names," Biden told the crowd. "It's not because I'm important, but I've been there a long time. I've been going to conferences with them since they were young parliamentarians."

Where other candidates avoid hypotheticals, Biden thrives in contingent scenarios of his own making. He often explains what would have been different if he had been president after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, by delivering the portion of a speech - complete with a "my fellow Americans" preamble - he says he would have given days after the attacks.

In it, Biden announces a global summit to fight "radical fundamentalism," a mythical event complete with a date (Oct. 1, 2001), a venue (either Brussels or Geneva, depending on the retelling) and an invite list ("the world's major powers").

When questioned about the recent Middle East peace conference, Biden was ready with the outline of a deal. "This is an opportunity, if we're smart, to bring the Syrians into this deal, work out an agreement on the Golan Heights in return for Syria ceasing and desisting their support for Hezbollah and Hamas, thereby giving an opportunity on the West Bank and Gaza for the present leadership of Fatah and the leadership of Israel to work out final agreement between them," he said.

Biden has found a way of thrashing though the consensus on fundamental issues. At a recent debate when other candidates said that Iran was the country's biggest foreign-policy threat, Biden volunteered that Pakistan was more dangerous. When an Iowa voter asked about immigrants crossing the border illegally and perpetrating terrorist acts, Biden averred plainly, "I'm more concerned about people using legal means," such as properly-issued visas, to enter the country.

Biden, who has supported Iraq-war funding while arguing for an end to the war, has blurred the ideological lines of war and peace by embracing hawkishness as an attitude even when rejecting it as policy. In recent weeks, he has forcefully threatened to impeach the vice president and president - in that order, he specified - if they tried to attack Iran.

That sensibility makes Biden the "daddy in the mommy party," according to his political director Danny O'Brien. It is a quality advisers say will draw older male caucusgoers, especially in blue-collar river cities like Davenport and Dubuque with sizable Catholic communities.

Quotes from Irish poets and Irish-Catholic relatives are the rare hint of Biden's blue-collar background. O'Brien acknowledges the campaign has had difficulty getting voters' attention (both in Iowa and nationwide) and that there is still "some work we have to do in introducing him."

Even older voters who remember Biden from 1988 are likely to remember an entirely different candidate - one closer, chronologically and stylistically, to the "29-year-old kid" who was elected to the Senate in 1972.

His first presidential campaign was filled with Kennedy references, stories about his working-class family, and lofty rhetoric about how baby boomers would change politics.

"He was prone to appeal to idealism to excess, relying more on his speaking ability than on his knowledge," said Dave Nagle, then a Democratic congressman from Iowa.

After getting out of the race, Biden told The Washington Post that "I don't know if I will ever run for president again, but I know if I do, the best way to prepare for it is . . . to learn more about the issues I'm dealing with, to demonstrate the staying power and the seriousness a lot of you [reporters] doubted that I have."

Today, all cuff links and oratory, Biden comes off as a central-casting committee chairman - now of Foreign Relations, late of Judiciary - so much so that he recounted with relish that a local Iowa reporter had expressed surprise to learn that he was one of the Senate's poorest members. "People assume I was born behind a podium," he said.

This year's Biden talks about his background so intermittently that the moments of extreme trauma that have shaped his life - the death of his wife and child in a 1972 car crash and his two brain aneurysms in 1988 - pop up in his remarks as jarring asides.

In Iowa, the voters who come to his events seem less curious about his biography than his expertise.

In West Des Moines, a woman asked about the privatization of water.

Biden's answer touched on green buildings, riparian rights, local planning practices in Delaware, and the high cost of Dasani water.

"What about the World Bank?" the woman asked.

"I could talk about the World Bank, the IMF. You want me to go global!" Biden said, smiling.

"I think you and I should have a conversation after this is all over," he went on, putting his arm around her shoulder and launching into a brief agricultural history of Darfur.