The Orbis

Issue date: 9/10/08 Section: News/Features

Democratic Senator Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. of Delaware

On August 23, as news of Obama's "It's not you" talks with potential running mates aired, speculation on Sen. Obama's second-in-command narrowed. By 3 a.m., the Democratic Party had a VP candidate. "Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee … Spread the word!" declared a text message distributed by Obama's campaign, a message later confirmed by an email from Obama himself.

Now, with the question of Obama's VP candidate answered, the responsible American voter searches for the answers to an entirely new line of inquiry. Exactly who is Joe Biden? What is his political history? What will his name bring to the Democratic ticket? And will caricatures of him be nearly as satisfying as those of Cheney? In the interest of constituent knowledge, let's consult Biden's record to aid in answering at least a few of these questions.

First elected to the US Senate at age 29, Joe Biden is currently serving his sixth term for Delaware, becoming the longest-serving representative for that state. He maintained the position of chairman of the Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995 and now serves at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden pursued the 1988 Democratic nomination, but dropped out of the race amid accusations of plagiarism. The words in question, which occurred within the closing remarks of a speech at the Iowa State Fair, were supposedly about his family's roots, but were actually taken from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Though Biden had previously attributed the words to him, he did not at that time. A seemingly forgivable discrepancy, the controversy grew when earlier incidents of plagiarism surfaced--first, in a law school paper in which five pages were adopted word for word from a law review article, and second, in a speech quoting Robert F. Kennedy without citation.

Biden ran for the Democratic presidential nomination again this year but suspended his campaign after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses.

Speculation concerning Biden's connections to the MBNA credit card company, a company based in Wilmington and recently bought by Bank of America, has also created controversy for the candidate. According to the Center for Responsible Politics, the company remains Biden's biggest financial supporter, contributing $214,000 into his campaigns since 1989. The company hired his son Hunter as a management trainee right out of college and quickly promoted him to executive VP. In 2005, Biden supported a bankruptcy law championed by the company that made it more difficult for consumers to erase debts. Saying it allowed "banks and credit card companies to tilt the playing field in their favor, at the expense of hard-working Americans," Obama has skewered Republican nominee McCain in the past for backing the same bill.

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