Biden, with a proclivity to talk, is noted for his consensus-building and style
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden is an archetypical veteran Washington politician: fiercely partisan, combative and glib, but also a senator who has developed a reputation as a consensus- builder on tough issues.
The 65-year-old Delaware Democrat, the fifth-youngest person ever elected to the U. S. Senate when he won his seat at age 29 in 1972, appears to be the kind of elder statesman/Washington insider that political analysts think Barack Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, needs advising him.
What separates Biden from the Senate pack, though, is not his resume. It’s his style.
He is a politician who can discuss, seemingly for hours, a detailed plan for rebuilding Iraq. But in 2006, about three months after offering a proposal for partitioning that country into three regions, he probably got just as much notice when he quipped while campaigning, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
These two sides of Joe Biden — conciliator and “regular guy” — have both helped and hurt him throughout his career.
Biden briefly made a presidential bid in 1987, but his proclivity to talk and talk got him in trouble. In a television ad, Biden used, without attribution, the words of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock during a debate in Iowa. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” Biden asked. “Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family ever to go to college?”
In 1991, during the Clarence Thomas hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden headed, he was criticized for not being quick to scrutinize Anita Hill’s allegations that the Supreme Court nominee had harassed her. Biden did eventually convene hearings examining the charges and voted against Thomas.
Biden the deal-maker was instrumental four years later in shepherding President Bill Clinton’s crime initiative through Congress. The legislation aimed to add 100,000 police officers on America’s streets.
He became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2001 and a year later was battling many leaders in his own party over whether to give President Bush broad authority to wage war in Iraq.
Biden fought some of his party’s wiliest strategists, notably West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, but 29 Democrats joined 48 Republicans to give Bush the bipartisan backing he wanted.
Yet Biden also remained a critic of administration policy, and by 2006, was advocating another way to deal with the increasingly unpopular conflict.
Rather than timetables or surges, he proposed federalizing Iraq and giving Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds autonomy over separate regions.
Biden is still a consensus-builder and a talker — something Obama knows firsthand. An early effort by Biden to compliment Obama drew criticism as racially insensitive when he said Obama was the first mainstream black presidential candidate to be “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Biden was born in Scranton, Pa., and his family moved to Delaware while he was still in grade school. His first wife, Neilia, and a daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was elected to the Senate.
He married Jill Tracy Jacobs in 1977, and they have a daughter, Ashley, 27, a social worker.
He has two sons from his first marriage. Beau, 39, Delaware’s attorney general, is a National Guard captain, about to be deployed to Iraq. Hunter, 38, has worked as a corporate Washington lobbyist.
