In the last few hours Joseph Robinette Biden Jnr. has given his first vice-presidential candidate speech.
The speech played heavily on his supposed hard work in the U.S. Senate since 1972 and his modest financial circumstances.
Well it seems that Biden (along with Obama and McCain) does not have an enviable record in the Senate.
During the current Congress he has missed 193 votes or 30% of all occasions on which he could have voted.
That makes him the fifth highest scoring senator on the current missed votes list.
The Washington Post has a list of all missed votes since he entered the Senate here.
As for his income, on his Senate webpage Biden admits to: $165,200 Senate salary and $20,500 from teaching. In a 2005 ranking of the 100 senators for wealth, he was 99th.
Interestingly he doesn't mention extra monies received for sitting on numerous Senate committees and we don't know whether that book deal brought home the bacon.
While his 2006 Senate financial disclosure report available online shows that he also has a personal investment portfolio, a pension plan and his wife draws a teaching salary.
Senator Biden unsuccessfully stood for Democratic pre-selection in the 2007 presidential race and withdrew from the 1998 race when it was reported that he had plagiarised a number of speeches, including a speech by U.K. Labor Party leader, Neil McKinnock.
According to Famous Plagarists:
Joe Biden’s history of plagiarism and “stressless scholarship” gave plenty of ammo to his enemies, one of them choosing to circulate a so-called “attack video” to demonstrate Biden’s outright plagiarism of a British politician’s speech. But this appropriation from Neal Kinnock was not the first occurrence of unacknowledged lifting by the senator from Delaware. In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper.
The senator also came to public attention for his behaviour during the Thomas-Hill hearings.
National Review online reports that Biden is also quite famous for being a lifelong sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease:
According to The New Republic, in October 2001, Biden encountered a group of airline pilots and flight attendants who wanted his help in passing emergency benefits for laid-off airline workers. "I hope you will support my work on Amtrak as much as I have supported you," Biden told them. "If not, I will screw you badly."
A list of his classic political slips here.
So to recap. Joe Biden is your typical candidate.
He massages his personal history by 'borrowing' the words and personal anecdotes of another, where possible avoids mentioning the real extent of his income, rewrites politcal history, turns up in the Senate when he wants to and generally tries to throw his weight around.
In other words - a 26-year political job horse who now relies on a wing and a prayer to get by in the U.S. Congress.
Definitely not the statesman with sound judgment praised by Obama in Springfield - more like the usual pitcher of warm spit.
A choice which offers little hope of change to the rest of the world.
