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Joseph R. Biden, Jr., born
in 1942, Democratic member of the United States Senate
from Delaware (1973- 
and vice-presidential candidate in the 2008
presidential election. Biden joined the ticket of Democratic presidential
candidate Barack Obama after running unsuccessfully for the
presidential nomination. He first gained national attention in 1987 when he made
his original bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He dropped out of
the race for the 1988 presidential contest after being accused of plagiarism in
his speeches.
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a middle-class, Irish-Catholic family, Biden graduated from the University of Delaware and then earned a law degree from Syracuse University in 1968. He practiced criminal law, first as a public defender, then as a partner in his own Wilmington, Delaware, firm.
He was a decided underdog when in 1972, at the age of 29, he ran for the U.S. Senate. His only previous elected office was a seat on the New Castle County Council. Biden won by just over 3,000 votes to become the second-youngest person ever elected to the U.S. Senate. Just weeks after his election, Biden’s wife and infant daughter were killed and his two young sons seriously injured in an automobile accident.
During his career in the Senate, Biden became known as a moderate Democrat. He was chairman of the Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995 when the Democrats lost control of the Senate. After the Democrats temporarily regained control of the Senate in May 2001, Biden became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He lost that position after the Republicans retook control of the Senate following the 2002 midterm elections but regained it after the Democrats captured control of the 110th Congress in January 2007.
Since 1991 Biden has also been an adjunct professor of law at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, where he teaches constitutional law. Following the death of his first wife, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. He has two children by his first wife and one by his second.
Biden’s foreign policy experience was expected to be an asset to the Democratic ticket in 2008. Obama also reportedly chose him as a running mate because of his appeal to white working-class voters, particularly in the Northeast.
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