Offering reassurance, wooing working class

A year ago, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware was tramping around Iowa without a police escort or one of those attendant press mobs bristling with microphones. Running for president in the shadow of two celebrities, he was 20 years past his status as The Next Big Thing in American politics.

Yesterday, TV networks went live when Biden made his first appearance in Springfield, Ill., as Sen. Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate.

Biden, 65, an authority on foreign policy and a longtime Washington insider, shores up the perceived weaknesses of the 47-year-old Obama, who, in his first Senate term, lacks significant foreign-policy or legislative experience.

Obama made the critical strategic decision that he needed to reassure voters in his tightening race with Republican Sen. John McCain, picking a 36-year veteran of the Senate instead of an outside-the-Beltway choice that might have underscored what has been his core appeal, as the "change" candidate of a new generation.

There was another important imperative at work: opening a possible entrée to the working-class white voters who mostly shunned Obama for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the final months of their Democratic primary battle.

Biden comes from a blue-collar background and is a native of the battleground state of Pennsylvania, born in Scranton. His favorite TV show: any Philadelphia Eagles game. Biden also is Roman Catholic, a group that Obama had trouble connecting with during the primaries - though he supports abortion rights, making him acceptable to the party's feminist groups.

In Illinois, Obama called Biden that "scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds" and said he would be a "fighter" for the middle class. Clinton also highlighted her Scranton ancestry - her father came from there - and used similar pugilistic language to win big in the Pennsylvania primary.

"I'm here for the cops and the firefighters, the teachers and the line workers . . . folks whose lives are the measure of whether the American dream endures," Biden said.

During his short-lived campaign for the 2008 nomination, Biden dwelled in briefing-book detail on foreign affairs and stressed the need to be careful in withdrawing from Iraq - at a time when most voters in the Iowa caucuses just wanted the troops out as soon as possible. "Telling the truth is more important than making you feel good," Biden said at a corn-boil in eastern Iowa in August 2007, a sentiment he repeated often on the trail.

Inevitably, after Biden spoke in an Iowa home, VFW hall or a community center to a handful of Democrats, somebody would say something like: "He's so qualified, so impressive. Too bad he can't win. Maybe he should be secretary of state."

Now, Biden will be on a kind of diplomatic mission for Obama, though he is an envoy with bite. Biden has gravitas - sometimes he sounds like the prototype of a windy senator - but he also has a mischievous Irish gleam in his eye and loves the fight. He should be able to go after McCain while Obama stays above the fray.

"Joe's out there hugging and kissing people - he just keeps going," John Martilla, Biden's media consultant since 1972, said last year, admiring how his client was working rooms in Iowa despite trailing in the polls.

Biden prizes loyalty. Most of his aides have been with him for decades, and his closest adviser is his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who managed his first campaign for county council years ago.

Biden's mouth also just keeps going. He's blunt and sardonic.

Many Democrats consider the best sound bite of the campaign so far a shot that Biden took at Republican Rudy Giuliani in a televised debate last October at Drexel University. Every sentence that Giuliani utters has "a subject, a verb and 9/11," Biden said. His rivals burst out laughing. In another debate, the moderator asked Biden if he could exercise enough verbal discipline to be president. His succinct answer: "Yes." At still another debate, with rivals scoring one hit or another, Biden began his answer with, "You know, the American people could care less about what's going on up here."

Yesterday, Biden tweaked McCain for his many houses, saying that before McCain could empathize with families' kitchen-table issues, he'd have to figure out which of seven tables at which to sit.

The downside to his fluency is that Biden also has a long history of verbal gaffes.

For instance, Biden had to apologize just as Obama was kicking off his campaign last year because he said that Obama was "the first mainstream African American [presidential candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Campaigning in New Hampshire, Biden said that in Delaware, "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

And Republicans are already using Biden's remark last year that Obama was not qualified to be president in an attack ad - and Pennsylvania GOP chairman Rob Gleason said that the pick "weakens their ticket" by pairing the "consummate Washington insider" with the candidate of change.

But Obama may have been looking at Biden's biography differently. He has overcome tremendous obstacles: the accident that killed his wife and daughter and critically injured his two sons before he was sworn in to the Senate.

His first presidential campaign, in 1988, ended in accusations of plagiarism, and then a brain aneurysm almost killed him. Becoming Obama's running mate represents getting up after you get knocked down, as Biden likes to put it.

"I'm a seasoned guy . . . and I really feel completely at ease," Biden said in an interview last year during a snowstorm in Muscatine, Iowa.