Biden is no prepackaged politician

Politicians — especially when they choose to duck a race for that next high office they have lusted after for years because they don’t believe they can win it — regularly tell us that they “want to spend more time with (their) family.” 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is one politician who means it.

He makes the 80-minute train trip on the Metroliner from his home in Wilmington to Washington — and back again — almost every day. After 34 years in the Senate, you can be sure the train crew knows Biden and he knows them. Every Christmas to show his appreciation, Biden gives a holiday dinner for these Amtrak employees. A liberal who actually likes people!

Here was underdog Democrat Joe Biden talking over a lunch hosted by the Christian Science Monitor to several dozen Washington reporters. For those of us who have covered him during his Senate years and during his aborted 1988 presidential campaign, this was a different Joe Biden.

Gone, for the most part, was his earlier proclivity when asked, “What time is it?” to launch into the history of watch-making and why Switzerland was its home. As he has mostly been in two disciplined debate appearances, at the Monitor lunch Biden was short-winded and straightforward.

What about the low poll numbers recorded recently for the new Democratic Congress?

“Totally understandable.” One reason: “We were not straightforward” about what a Democratic majority could actually do. While the Democrats hold a bare majority in the Senate, “You need 60 votes to proceed and 67 votes to prevail over a presidential veto.”

What about Democratic presidential candidates who talk about not leaving any residual troops in Iraq?

“They don’t know what they’re talking about is the honest-to-God truth.”

Asked if the option of U.S. military strikes against Iran is realistic, Biden answered, “No,” and added, “The one thing that would unite the Iranian people is to bomb Iran.”

His personal story is touching. Five weeks after he, at the age of 29, won an upset 1972 victory over an “unbeatable” Republican senator, his wife Neilia and their infant daughter, Amy, were killed and their two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were severely injured when a truck smashed into the side of her car and drove it more than 150 feet. Now long and happily remarried and again a father, he refuses to be an absentee parent.

Biden’s 1988 campaign collapsed after he was taped at the Iowa State Fair using, without attribution, almost identical language to that of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, who had recently lost to Margaret Thatcher: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family to go to a university? ... Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?

“Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s not because they weren’t as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand.”

In 1988, the Year of Character (Gary Hart was driven from the race after a weekend tryst), that tape effectively ended Biden’s candidacy.

By my lights, Joe Biden was wrong in voting to give George W. Bush the authority to invade and occupy Iraq. He has been since one of the strongest and most consistent critics of the Bush policy, especially of its lack of planning, too few troops for the mission and defective intelligence. He still has the best teeth in politics, a quick wit and a streak of candor.

Why did he end the reporters’ session some 20 minutes early? To get back to a Senate vote on making it easier for unions to sign up workers, he admitted, because organized labor — which matters to him and his campaign — wanted him to.

A recurring, and mostly deserved, slam on political candidates is that they are too rehearsed, too programmed, too given to parroting their talking points. Not so Joe Biden — he is not pre-packaged.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. COPYRIGHT 2007 MARK SHIELDS