Biden's bonds to family, through good times and bad, are at the core of a long Senate career

WASHINGTON — Sen. Joe Biden took the dais Friday morning in Dover to send off a Delaware Army National Guard unit headed for Iraq.

In nearly four decades as a U.S. Senator, the Delaware Democrat has spoken at dozens of similar departures. This one, though, was different. His oldest son, Beau, is a captain in the unit preparing to deploy.

"Stand strong," Biden admonished his son and the 114 other members of the 261st Signal Brigade. "Stand together. Serve honorably. Come home to your families who love you."

Coming home safely to family is not something Joe Biden takes for granted.

Thirty six years ago, weeks after he narrowly won an improbable victory that sent him to the Senate, Biden lost his wife and their infant daughter in an automobile crash that critically injured Beau and his younger brother, Hunter.

"He was sworn in, literally, at my bedside," recalled Beau Biden, who was four at the time. "And he's never not been there."

In the 36 years since then, Biden has remained at the side of his family, commuting nearly two hours each morning from his home in Wilmington to Washington, then returning to Delaware each night after work by train.

"He went down, did his job, voted, and came home," said Beau, 39, in an interview some months ago.

"He did it to just be there," said Beau, who is the attorney general of Delaware. "To be there when we woke up in the morning, to scratch our back when we fell asleep at night, to be there if we had a bad dream. I used to think that's what all dads did. But it's not."

Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the third-youngest American ever elected to the Senate and currently the body's sixth-longest-serving member, Biden has been both mentor and father to his eldest son.

Beau followed in his father's footsteps to attend the prestigious Roman-Catholic prep school, Archmere Academy, near the family home outside Wilmington, then to the University of Delaware and the Syracuse University College of Law.

Beau was elected Delaware's attorney general two years ago, and there's talk he could seek his father's Senate seat if Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is elected in November.

When Obama tapped his Senate colleague Biden to be his running mate in August, the choice surprised some in the party.

It was Biden, after all, who nearly two years ago referred to Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" to seek the presidency.

If that remark seemed patronizing to some, it didn't seem that way to Obama, who introduced Biden as "one of the finest public servants of our time" when he announced in August they would run as a team.

"He was hoping for somebody who would appeal to working class voters and add foreign policy expertise to the ticket," said John Pitney, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

In the weeks since then, "He's played the role he was assigned to play," said Darrell West, director of governance studies with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "He's brought passion to the stump, he has delivered some of the tough messages."

That was part of Biden's mission on Thursday night, when he faced off against his Republican counterpart, Sarah Palin, in the vice presidential debate in St. Louis.

Even Biden's backers worried that he might stumble walking the razor's edge between demonstrating the policy expertise he's acquired and the debate skills he's honed through long decades in the Senate, and not appearing to brow-beat the Alaska governor who just five weeks ago was a stranger to the national stage.

"I'm very nervous for the vice-presidential debate," said Taylor Barden, a Biden supporter, after hearing him speak to about 300 members of the National Jewish Democratic Council gathered at a five-star Washington hotel in September. "If he goes after her in any way the Republicans are just going to destroy him."

Biden, though, struck a careful balance in the Thursday debate. He presented himself as courtly without being condescending, and plenty seasoned without appearing a bully.

He took on Palin only obliquely, if at all, mostly leveling his attacks instead at GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

"I love him," Biden said of McCain, the Arizona Republican who has served in the Senate with Biden for 22 years. Personal views aside, though, said Biden "he's out of touch."

Similar criticisms have been levied against Biden, who has a history of careless speech that recently led New York Times correspondent John Broder to label him "a human verbal wrecking crew." As Broder wrote last month, "A day on the campaign trail without a cringe-inducing gaffe is a rare blessing."

A sampler of Biden's rhetorical faux pas could fill a cautionary textbook for aspiring politicians.

In just the past few weeks, he's criticized as "terrible" an Obama campaign ad criticizing McCain for paltry computer skills; claimed to be Washington's first proponent of solar energy; and suggested that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., "might have been a better pick than me" to be Obama's running mate.

In a September interview with CBS News, he told Katie Couric that "when the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on television and ././. said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" Roosevelt wasn't president during the market crash of 1929, and television wasn't introduced until the next decade.

On a campaign stop in Columbia, Mo., Biden asked Democratic State Sen. Chuck Graham to "stand up, let the people see you," before realizing that Graham, a paraplegic, was in a wheelchair.

"Oh, God love you," an embarrassed Biden said. "What am I talking about?"

For better or worse, though, the public has paid less attention to Biden and his rhetorical slip-ups, analysts say, than to his vice presidential opponent.

"Biden hasn't made much of a splash," said Pitney. "Palin has completely eclipsed him."

That doesn't seem to have much hurt Biden. Nor have his errant words, which tend to be seen - by his backers, at least - as a refreshing bit of candor amid over-packaged, tightly choreographed, elegantly scripted politicians who lack a human touch.

Nearly nine out of ten Americans (87 percent) who saw Thursday's vice presidential debate think Biden is qualified to serve as president, while only 46 percent feel that way about Palin, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken after the face-off. The survey queried 611 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

"If, God forbid, something would happen, he would make a great president too," said Morris Rodenstein, 57, of Silver Spring, Md, who attended the Jewish Democrats' gathering. "I just think he is a wonderful human being, a very smart man."

Biden, 65, was born in Scranton, Pa., the son of a car salesman. Ten years later the family moved to the outskirts of Wilmington, where Biden was raised in a working class Roman Catholic community.

He overcame a childhood stutter that had led classmates to taunt him, calling him Bu-bu-biden. He hewed to his father's counsel that it's not how many times a guy gets knocked down that counts, but, rather, how quickly he gets back up.

In 1977, still reeling from the loss of his wife and daughter five years before, Biden married his current wife, Jill, a college English professor. They have a grown daughter.

His first presidential bid came to an end in August, 1987, after Biden quoted from a speech written by British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock. He'd quoted from the speech before, attributing the passage to Kinnock, but did not do so in a speech before the Iowa State Fair. Political writers tagged him a plagiarist, the label stuck, and Biden bowed out of the campaign.

"I just screwed up," Biden explained last year on the David Letterman Show. "It was a flat mistake on my part."

After bowing out of the 1987 Democratic primaries, Biden returned to Washington. There, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he led the Democratic fight to defeat President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nomination of conservative judge and legal scholar Robert Bork.

In February of the next year, Biden suffered a brain aneurysm so serious that last rites were performed before surgery corrected the problem.

In 2002, Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to authorize President Bush to go to war against Iraq five months before he launched the invasion in March, 2003. More than five years later, with 4,180 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and 30,680 wounded, Biden has joined Obama in vowing to end the conflict.

"For John McCain, there's no end in sight," Biden asserted in Thursday's debate. If he and Obama are elected, he pledged, "We'll end this war."

In the 90-minute debate, Biden was restrained, in both rhetoric and demeanor, except for once. That was when he followed up on a passage from Palin in which she mentioned her own son, who is serving in Iraq, and "being a mom" concerned for his welfare.

Once again, like so many times before in his career, it was to his bond with family, and the tragedy they've known, that Biden turned as a point of reference.

"I understand what it's like," he said, briefly choking up, "to wonder what it's like if your kid's going to make it."