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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 11 2007, 4:19 PM EDT (current) | heidianna | 2 words added, 1 word deleted |
| Jun 11 2007, 4:19 PM EDT | heidianna | 1 word added, 1 word deleted |
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Key: Additions Deletions
Full Name:Name: Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.Current Office: U.S. Senator from Delaware, elected 1972 (sixth term)
Born: Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 20, 1942
Education: University of Delaware (1965); Syracuse University Law School (1968)
Religion: Roman Catholic
Family: Married to Jill Tracy Jacobs; they have one child, Ashley; has three children from a previous marriage: Joseph III, Robert, and Amy (his first wife and daughter Amy died in a car accident in 1972)
Significant Career Experience:
U.S. Senator, 1972-present (Ranking member, Committee on Foreign Relations)
New Castle County Council, 1970-1972
Elected at 29 years old, Joe Biden has spent more of his life in the Senate than outside of it. Having served as chair for influential committees, including the Judiciary (1987-1995) and Foreign Relations (2001-2003) committees, if Biden chooses to run he will easily become the most experienced candidate within the federal government.
The chief problem for Biden, though, is that a lengthy record of experience in the federal government does not always constitute an advantage, especially if that experience comes with a 30-plus-year voting record.
Still, Biden’s strength of experience will give him a decided advantage when talking about defense and homeland security issues, where voters often prefer a more seasoned driver at the wheel. While some candidates spend the years preceding their presidential campaign “punching their foreign relations card,” Biden’s problem will be to pick the most popular and significant issues he’s worked on.
Biden’s extensive work on crime control will stand out in voters’ minds. He crafted the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Violence Against Women Act in 2000, two important pieces of legislation that add to the record of federal accomplishment in a way no other probable candidate can match.
Spending all that time in the Senate, however, has given Biden one of the worst cases of “Senate-itus”—a condition characterized by long-winded oratories and a propensity to end up on both sides of an issue, rather than firmly planted on one side or the other. (See: John Kerry) Like Kerry, Biden voted for the Iraq war, and now has become one of its most high-profile critics in the Senate.
In addition, Biden’s voting record will certainly become an issue. While he largely votes the party line, even those votes lead to confusing “I-voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it” scenarios. Biden also caters to credit card giant MBNA (which is headquartered in his home state), much to the disappointment of more left-leaning Democrats who oppose the favored policies of the credit card industry, specifically relating to the tightening of bankruptcy laws recently passed by the Senate.
Biden has the experience of having run for President before, even if that experience was by no means a good one. Running in a crowded field in 1988, it was leaked to reporters (by a Dukakis staffer) that Biden plagiarized significant portions of his stump speech from then-British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock, and that he also plagiarized work in his first-year writing class in law school.
While Biden has since been vindicated of blame in these incidents (it was determined that he had merely forgetten to credit a passage he’d cited many times before in the speech, and Syracuse law school cleared him of any hint of plagiarism—incidentally, Dukakis fired the aide responsible for the leak), in politics, perception is everything, and Biden may become the subject of more than a little right-wing talk show ridicule for the incidents.
Biden is proceeding as if he will run in 2008, banking on voters wanting foreign relations and national security experience, and a President that comes from the “sensible center” of the Democratic party. Not a bad bet at all.
