At age 29, in a race against an incumbent Republican, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became one of the youngest people ever elected to the U.S. Senate.
Shortly thereafter, the young senator lost his first wife and daughter in a tragic car accident. For the next five years, he raised his two sons as a single parent and continued to serve the people of Delaware.
About his loss and pain, Biden says, “They have helped me learn about so many incredibly decent Americans who came to my aid.”
Currently in his sixth term, he is Delaware’s longest-serving senator. The Delaware Democrat has spent 35 years in Congress-a tenure that began with the end of the Vietnam War. But experience isn’t everything, and Biden’s campaign for the White House lags badly in the polls.
Biden says his top priority as president would be “energy security.”
“If I could wave a wand and the Lord said I could solve one problem, I would solve the energy crisis,” he said this spring at a political rally in South Carolina. “That’s the single most consequential problem we can solve.”
Low in the polls and way behind in fundraising, Biden is banking on his plan for Iraq partition, a rural campaign strategy in early presidential contests and a last-man-standing style of politicking to push himself out of the back of the Democratic presidential pack. Aside from his undesirable ranking, he is arguably the most outspoken on domestic and foreign issues, especially the Iraq debacle.
Biden is a 35-year veteran of the Senate, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an influential Washington insider. But on the presidential stage, he has been overshadowed by other Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, all current or former Senate colleagues who together have less governing experience than Biden does. It’s a challenging climb for the Delaware senator accustomed to being a marquee player in the U.S. capitol.
So far, nothing has defined Biden’s campaign more than his views on Iraq. For more than a year, he has been pushing to decentralize the country and divide it into three semi-autonomous regions of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.
“There is no possibility in your lifetime or mine of having a strong central government in Iraq that is democratic and is viewed as being able to meet the needs of the Iraqi people,” he said.
While most senators live in Washington, Biden uses public transportation to commute home every night to be with his wife and his 89-year-old mother.