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Culturally, Joe Biden is not, as often claimed by his opponents, a member of the liberal elite: his background is conservative, Catholic, and lower- middle-class. His occasional eloquence has not diminished his reputation as a gauche, gaffe-prone bloviator who retains a down-home sensibility.

When his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. almost dropped out of politics before taking the U.S. Senate seat he had recently won. At age 65, however, he is in his sixth consecutive term.

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Biden's reputation as a liberal rests on his sometimes shaky relationship with female and minority activists. Responding to feminist outrage over his efforts, as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to suppress Anita Hill's 1991 allegations that she was sexual harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Biden secured passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and its reauthorization in 2000. Although the most strenuous attacks on VAWA have come from conservatives, objections to the legislative package transcend right-wing anti- feminist ideology. Critics across the political spectrum have charged that portions of VAWA short-circuit due process and are themselves sexist. Biden (unlike his Republican counterpart Sarah Palin) also supports hate-crime legislation, apparently having no problem with the thought- crime aspects of such laws.

Biden has called the Iraq war "the greatest foreign policy disaster of our time," but -- in contrast to Obama, who opposed the war from the beginning - - he objects to the conduct of the war, not its initiation. As early as 1998, during the Clinton Administration, he advocated a "preventive" invasion of Iraq. In 2002, his powers of persuasion led many skeptical Democrats to swallow Bush Administration propaganda, and to support the October Congressional resolution authorizing military intervention.

Although the ACLU's most recent Congressional scorecard gives Biden a pro-civil liberties rating of 91 percent, his differences with ACLU policy cast a shadow over such points of agreement as support for gay rights and rejection of a proposed constitutional ban on flag desecration. Biden's enthusiasm for the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and its 2006 continuation is barely distinguishable from that of Bush hard-liners. He is fond of noting that many of its provisions mirror an anti-terrorism package he filed in 1994, after the Oklahoma bombing.

Cyberjournalist Declan McCullagh offers several criticisms of Biden. He calls Biden "a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI." He also notes that Biden has worked with the recording industry to over-expand copyright protections and criminalizie teenaged file sharers, advocates internet filters and internet taxes, and has a record on privacy that is "hardly stellar." Biden has endorsed many of the snooping provisions of the USA Patriot Act, and has voted to loosen restrictions on cell-phone wiretaps.

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Biden' time in the Palinolithic
Is Palin queer?