WASHINGTON (AP) - Joe Biden has lived a life of second chances,
a cycle that's been cruel and redemptive by turns. Now he's
starting over once again.
Deeply private yet in-your-face, collegial yet ideological, the
Delaware senator brings a wealth of foreign policy experience to
Barack Obama's Democratic ticket, plus wisdom in the ways of
Washington and an infectious enthusiasm for political donnybrooks.
He adds suspense, too, over the question of when - not if -
he'll put his foot in his mouth. Biden's agile mind comes with a
loose tongue that cannot always be properly restrained.
Back in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., Biden's Catholic
schoolmates nicknamed him Dash because he stuttered so much his
speech sounded like Morse Code. Biden overcame that rip at his
confidence, smoothed his talk and doesn't seem to have quieted down
since.
The strongest sign that Obama was seriously considering Biden
for his running mate, despite some differences over national
security, energy and more in their voting records, was Biden's odd
absence from the public in recent days. Normally he's a sucker for
a microphone.
And it was a sign of those Washington ways that when he told
reporters, "I'm not the guy,' no one believed him, just as no one
believed him when he said of the vice presidential slot last year,
"I would not accept it if anyone offered it to me."
That's how people talk in politics - a different sort of
telegraphing code. And after more than a third of a century in
Washington, and two short-lived presidential campaigns of his own,
Biden has it down pat.
He came to Washington as a wunderkind, elected to the Senate in
1972 at age 29 - the earliest possible age - and just meeting the
rule that one must be 30 when sworn in. The knock against him used
to be that he was more sizzle than steak, articulate but perhaps
not all that deep.
At age 65, as a party elder and veteran of titanic judicial
nomination struggles, world crises and legislative dealmaking, that
rap has faded.
His hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee are historical soliloquies on the fly, complete with
grace notes liberally dispensed to colleagues and witnesses of any
political persuasion, humor often directed at himself and
sharp-tongued fulmination over what he sees as the failures of the
Bush administration.
His first presidential campaign, in 1987, was a "train wreck"
by his own description, one of those times that forced him to pick
up pieces and start anew.
He'd lifted lines from a British politician, exaggerated his
academic achievements when boasting about his smarts to a voter who
challenged him ("I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,"
Biden recalls saying) and suffered horrendous headaches that turned
out to be life-threatening brain aneurisms that kept him out of the
Senate for seven months.
"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and
my career in the Senate," he writes in his memoirs. And that was
not the worst of his shattering episodes - not even close.
---
On Dec. 18, 1972, five weeks after Biden was elected to the
Senate, his wife Neilia, infant daughter Naomi and sons Beau and
Hunt were out in the family station wagon getting a Christmas tree
when a tractor-trailer broad-sided them.
Down in Washington, Sen.-elect Biden was using Sen. Robert
Byrd's spacious office that day - his own first office was so small
that anyone inside it had to stand up and move to let the door
open. Biden's sister Val took the phone call.
"There's been a slight accident," she said, chalk white.
"She's dead, isn't she?" Biden recalls saying, meaning his
wife.
Neilia and Naomi died in the crash. The boys were critically
injured. Biden said he did not find this out for sure until he flew
to Delaware and arrived at the hospital.
Biden came to understand how suicide could be seen not just as
an option "but a rational option."
He devoted himself to the care of his sons and was sworn in at
the bedside of one of them before they both recovered fully,
growing up to become lawyers.
As a single father, Biden committed himself to the Delaware
tradition of its U.S. senators coming home every night. A 100-mile
trip by road, his commute is by Amtrak, and he's been a fixture on
the morning and night trains for all these years.
He still will not work on Dec. 18, the date of the accident.
In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have a daughter,
Ashley.
Biden does not talk often of the tragedy but decades later,
anything to do with the welfare of his children still rankles - and
explains perhaps his sharpest rebuke of Obama as well as Hillary
Rodham Clinton in this year's primary campaign.
Capt. Beau Biden, a member of the Delaware National Guard and
the state's attorney general, had been preparing for deployment to
Iraq, and it did not sit well with his father that Obama and
Clinton had at times voted against money for the war.
"There's no political point worth my son's life," Biden
snapped. "There's no political point worth anybody's life out
there. None."
---
Biden led Judiciary Committee proceedings in the explosive
debates that rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork
in 1987 and approved Clarence Thomas in 1991.
He earned the ire of conservative activists in the Bork
hearings, only to be criticized by liberals later for sending the
Thomas nomination to the Senate floor without, in their view, fully
investigating Anita Hill's allegations of misbehavior by Thomas.
Reflecting on the Thomas-Hill hearings, Biden said personal
accusations should be handled in closed sessions. "We could have
the Lord Almighty be nominated and someone in this country will
communicate to the committee something negative about that
person."
Biden counted a law to protect women from violence and his push
to end genocide in the Balkans as the two matters that redeemed the
lost promise of his first presidential campaign.
The latter issue brought him into conflict with the Democratic
administration of President Clinton, which he said was not doing
"a damn thing" to help the beleaguered citizens of Bosnia. It
also brought him face to face with this year's Republican
presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, as they engaged in a TV
debate on Biden's push for air strikes in 1993. McCain was just one
of the Vietnam veterans from both parties who feared intervention
would turn into a quagmire.
"If we do nothing, there's a Serb victory and the continuation
of genocide," Biden said.
"If we do what you want, we only have two options," McCain
responded. "That's admit failure or send ground troops."
"What do we do if we don't do anything?" Biden challenged.
"I'm not ready to risk another Vietnam," McCain said.
"This is not Vietnam," Biden asserted.
The U.S. finally acted and was spared another Vietnam.
Now, McCain on one side and Obama and Biden on the other are
divided over whether Iraq could turn out to be a Vietnam. Biden,
unlike Obama, supported the invasion but pushed in the presidential
campaign for an even speedier withdrawal than Obama has envisioned,
and proposed dividing Iraq into largely autonomous Sunni, Shiite
and Kurdish regions.
---
Obama and Biden have taken opposing positions in Senate votes at
least a dozen times.
Obama voted for tougher fuel economy standards and an energy
bill both opposed by Biden. Obama endorsed the Bush
administration's military procedures for detaining and prosecuting
foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo in a bill that Biden voted
against.
The two were also at odds over legislation making it harder for
people to erase debts in bankruptcy; Biden supported it and Obama
was opposed. Also unlike Obama, Biden supported stricter rules on
lawmakers' pet projects, the confirmation of Gen. Michael Hayden as
CIA chief and renewal of the Patriot Act.
Biden's second presidential campaign faltered early on, just one
of the Democrats shunted to the sidelines as the bracing contest
between Obama and Clinton dominated everything. He dropped out
after finishing poorly in Iowa, the opening contest.
He proved to be a cheerful campaigner who mixed easily with
voters, got along with rivals and displayed a self-deprecating
humor that leavened debates and speeches.
When the longwinded senator was asked if he could reassure
voters he had the discipline needed on the world stage, drew laughs
with a rare one-word answer: "Yes."
Obama jumped in to defend him on another occasion, when Biden
was asked if he had a problem with minorities.
The question was rooted in Biden's occasional gaffes. He had
apologized earlier for describing Obama as "articulate" and
"clean" in one unguarded episode that was taken by some to have a
racial overtone.
And he'd had to defend his remark that "you cannot go to a
7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian
accent."
---
Associated Press writer Sharon Theimer contributed to this
story.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)