Obama chooses Biden as running mate

Intensely personal campaigner
Biden is an effusive, wisecracking, and often intensely personal campaigner. No Democratic politician is more literally "in your face" with voters.

At a campaign breakfast in Iowa in 2007, he claimed credit for getting money appropriated to build a new type of armored vehicle that reduced casualties from roadside explosives in Iraq by 70 percent.

Walking into the audience, Biden got six inches away from one woman’s face.

Biting off his words, Biden vehemently told her, “I will not cut one single solitary cent of the money that we need to build those vehicles to protect these kids — and they cost billions of dollars.”

During his bid for the nomination last year, Biden criticized Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Georgy Abdaladze / AP Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat, visits Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, on Sunday, Aug. 17.

“Both Hillary and Barack didn’t get it right,” Biden said, when they had their “little spat” on whether a president could order a unilateral attack on terrorists in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Biden said Obama “didn’t know it was already U.S. policy” but “was attempting understandably to show more strength” on military matters.

And he criticized Obama and former Sen. John Edwards for “playing the populism card, the idea that rich are bad, poor are good, the nobility of America lies in the poor. I think that’s a losing general election argument; I think it’s a losing argument, period.”

He argued, “The rich are as patriotic as the poor, if you ask of them.”

Biden also parted company from Obama in a May 2007 vote on cutting off funds for operations in Iraq.

“I knew what the political vote was — it was to vote ‘no,’” Biden explained a few months later. “I had bets with my staff that every one of the senators who were running (for president) would vote against it, even though they knew better. I went ahead and voted for the funding.”

Presidential contenders Obama, Clinton and Sen. Chris Dodd were among the 14 senators who voted "no" on funding.

Biden has not always taken the predictable liberal Democratic line: He surprised some of his fellow Democrats in 1975 when he advocated a measure to ban the use of busing to school integration. He argued that busing was counter-productive.

Biden has begun a political dynasty in Delaware:  his son Beau was elected state attorney general in 2006.

Biden commutes to the nation’s capitol every day from Wilmington on Amtrak.

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