In Biden, Obama chooses a lunch-bucket Democrat with deep foreign policy experience

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff

As he prepared last year to make his second run for president, Joe Biden met with advisers in the family room of his home in Wilmington, Del., when someone recommended 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 their 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.'''

In Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has chosen a running mate with strengths in areas where Obama is perceived to have deficits. Biden's experience -- six terms in the Senate -- and his deep knowledge of foreign policy and the ways of Washington head the list. Moreover, as an Irish-Catholic, lunch-bucket Democrat, Biden may also help Obama appeal to a bloc of white, blue-collar voters who resisted him during the nomination fight.

If 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 to Obama, who is often characterized as cool and cerebral, Biden is direct and earthy. In May, when President Bush, addressing the Israeli Knesset, suggested Obama was willing to appease terrorists, Biden's offered a raw retort. "This is bull----. This is malarkey," he said.

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

Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 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.

Now 65, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 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 he was not mature enough to be president then.

This year, he was a longshot in a field dominated by Obama and Hillary Clinton. 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 nemesis 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 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.

The Biden-Sasso relationship came full circle four years ago. Sasso, a key player in the campaign of presidential candidate 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 Ronald Reagan.

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.

Not long after that he underwent the first of two brain surgeries in 1988 to repair aneurysms, the potentially life-threatenging 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 in 1972, Biden suffered a devastating loss when a car carrying his wife and three children was struck by a tractor-trailer truck 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 3d 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 in Iraq this fall. Hunter Biden practices law in Washington, D.C.

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