A raw, outspoken complement to a cerebral Obama

Joe Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (John Moore/Getty Images/File)

As he prepared last year to make his second run for president, Joe Biden was meeting advisers in the family room of his home in Wilmington, Del., when someone recommended that he take a nuanced position on a tough issue.

"Joe stopped the guy right in his tracks," said Larry Rasky, a Boston-based consultant who worked for both Biden presidential campaigns. He told the group how much he appreciated and needed its help and advice, Rasky recalled, but quickly added: "I don't need you to tell me my opinion. I know what I think about these issues; I've been doing this for 35 years, and nothing in this campaign will be new to me."

If Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama intends to ride in and clean up the political culture of Washington, he's chosen a gray eminence, instead of a fresh face, to ride shotgun.

Compared with Obama, who is often characterized as cool and cerebral, Biden is direct and earthy. In May, when President Bush, addressing the Israeli Knesset, suggested that Obama was willing to appease terrorists, Biden offered a raw, profane retort followed by, "This is malarkey."

Ironically, Biden, who has a reputation as a motormouth, kept a lid on the biggest secret in American politics - his selection as a vice presidential candidate.

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has established himself as one of Congress's most prominent liberal hawks.

He took a leading role in pushing the Clinton administration to get involved, twice, to confront Serbian aggression in the Balkans - first in Bosnia, than in Kosovo.

Biden traveled last week to Georgia, a trip he said was made at the invitation of the country's president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

"I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," Biden said in a statement upon his return, in which he called for Congress to establish a $1 billion fund to aid Georgia's reconstruction.

He has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war. He voted for the war resolution in 2002, but later said it was a mistake based on administration intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction that proved to be false.

In 2002, Biden backed military intervention in Iraq, but partnered with Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican of Illinois, to propose an amendment that would have limited the use of force in Iraq to efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein.

Biden later described the effort as an attempt to strengthen the hand of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in internal White House deliberations about war planning.

He later worked with Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations to craft a proposal that would have split Iraq into three autonomous regions. The plan received the backing of 75 senators in a nonbinding vote, but was rejected by the Bush administration.

"Over the last eight years, he has been a powerful critic of the catastrophic Bush-McCain foreign policy and a voice for a new direction that takes the fight to the terrorists and ends the war in Iraq responsibly," Obama said yesterday in Springfield.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in Scranton, Pa., where he lived until he was 10. Then his father, a car salesman, moved the family to the suburbs of northern Delaware.

In his writings and speeches, Biden refers often to Scranton as the place where his early political values were formed, citing lessons from family members like "Grandpa Finnegan," a frequent source of wisdom in Biden's remarks.

After graduating from law school, Biden briefly practiced law in Wilmington before running for the county council in New Castle, Delaware's most populous county. Local debates over land use introduced him to early environmental issues such as water quality and sprawl, he recalled while campaigning in Iowa last year.

Now 65, Biden has spent more than half his life in the Senate, since his election at the age of 29 (he reached the constitutional threshold age of 30 between his election and swearing-in). From a young age, Biden considered himself presidential material.

His first run ended disastrously when he dropped out in the fall of 1987 after his candidacy was engulfed by charges of plagiarism and embellishing his academic record. He said later that he was not mature enough to be president then. This year, he was a long shot in a field dominated by Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York. Biden received generally high marks for his performance, particularly in later debates, but he struggled to raise money and withdrew after a distant fifth-place finish in the first contest, the Iowa caucuses.

John Sasso, a veteran Boston operative who managed Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, was Biden's archrival back then, but has watched him grow in stature since.

"He has really established himself as one of the small handful of this country's wise men on US foreign policy," said Sasso. More than 20 years ago, Sasso leaked to the media a video juxtaposing a Biden speech that paralleled one by a British Labor Party leader, Neil Kinnock. Biden had not credited Kinnock, as he customarily did, on the stump. By today's campaign standards of negative campaigning, it was garden-variety mischief, but at the time it ignited a firestorm, led to other lesser revelations, and drove Biden from the crowded field.

Four months after he dropped out, Biden exhibited self-effacing humor when, upon meeting Kinnock for the first time, presented him with a bound copy of Biden's speeches. "I told him he was welcome to use them whenever he liked, with or without attribution," Biden told reporters.

The Biden-Sasso relationship came full circle four years ago. Sasso, a key player in the presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kerry, worked closely with Biden, one of Kerry's most influential foreign policy advisers.

At the time he abandoned his first presidential run, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, leading the hearings and the opposition to Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan.

In 1988, he underwent the first of two brain surgeries to repair aneurysms, potentially life-threatening, balloon-like weakenings of an artery. He fully recovered both times.

As a two-time presidential candidate, Biden has been well vetted. "To the best of my knowledge, anything that is embarrassing about my past is pretty well public record," he said in a Los Angeles Times profile last year. "Any of you who take a look at my life will not be able to conclude that I am not an honorable man."

He lives modestly and is among the least affluent members of Congress. For his entire career in Washington, Biden has made a daily 80-minute commute on Amtrak from Delaware, and is by all accounts devoted to his family, which includes three surviving children and five grandchildren.

"Very few people deserve to be called an exemplar of anything, but he deserves to be called an exemplar regarding his relationship with his family," said John Marttila, a Boston-based consultant who has worked on Biden campaigns dating back to his first run for Senate in 1972. "It's the center of his life."

Six weeks after his upset victory for Senate in 1972, Biden suffered a devastating loss when a car carrying his wife and three children was struck by a tractor-trailer as they drove to shop for a Christmas tree.

His wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed, and their toddler sons, Joseph R. "Beau" Biden III and Robert H. "Hunter" Biden, were critically injured but fully recovered.

Beau Biden, elected attorney general of Delaware in 2006, is a captain in the Delaware Army National Guard. His unit is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq this fall. Hunter Biden practices law in Washington, D.C.

In 1977, their father married the former Jill Jacobs, who teaches English at Delaware Technical and Community College. They have a daughter, Ashley, who is a social worker.

"I'm here for their future," Biden said in a speech yesterday in Illinois. "I'm here for your kids . . . I'm here for the cops and the firefighters, the teachers and the line workers, the folks whose lives . . . are the measure of whether the American dream endures."