In Biden, a life story to complement Obama's

DENVER -- Maybe you didn't know that Joe Biden stuttered as a kid, takes a 91-minute train ride home to his wife each night and is so well known in a must-win swing state he's been called "Pennsylvania's third senator."

Barack Obama tapped as his running mate a man whose dramatic life story rivals his own, and holds political appeal far beyond the foreign-policy expertise that is Biden's most obvious asset.

The Delaware senator balances this ticket in many other ways. With his working-class background, Biden could help Obama fight his portrayal as a candidate of the elites, and win over the women voters who passionately supported Hillary Rodham Clinton. He's 65 years old to Obama's 47, Catholic to Obama's Protestant. Unlike Obama, he didn't attend Ivy League schools.

While Obama has frustrated some Democrats by being slow to attack, Biden is blunt and eager to wage political combat — qualities that could allow Obama to remain above the fray. Biden, who overcame his stutter as a boy by relentless drills, is a gifted if sometimes windy speaker who goes for the gut.

"He's comfortable on the attack and that will serve the ticket well," says Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.

Biden also stays close to his roots — in his visits to his hometown of Scranton, Pa., in the laws he works to pass and in the allies he's made in Delaware politics. When he returned last week from a trip to the embattled Republic of Georgia, for instance, he headed straight from the airport to a promised appearance at a firefighters hall.

In choosing Biden, Obama essentially is calculating that the Delaware senator's penchant for occasional gaffes won't be a distraction in the fall campaign.

Biden was driven from the 1988 presidential race for failing to credit a British politician for a passage Biden used in a stump speech. Biden has been lambasted more recently for clumsily praising Obama as "clean" and "articulate" and saying that in Delaware "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Hours after Obama made his pick, Republicans launched a "Biden gaffe clock."

The same brain-to-mouth quickness that sometimes misfires, on the other hand, produced possibly the most memorable and cutting line of the primary season: Biden's contention that every sentence uttered by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — at the time a candidate for the GOP nomination — was "a noun, a verb and 9/11."

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, another Democrat whose bluntness sometimes gets him in trouble, cast Biden's misfires as endearing. "It's pretty easy to fall in love with Joe Biden," he told USA TODAY Sunday. "Even his mistakes, you have a tendency to shake your head and say, 'But that's Joe.' "

Another potential downside of Obama's pick is one of the reasons he made it: the weight of Biden's experience. It's reassuring to wavering voters worried about Obama's short national resume. But it could undercut Obama's message of change.

Republicans have seized on that line of attack. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican often mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, on Sunday called Biden a "consummate insider" who was elected to the Senate when he and Obama were 11. "And he's known as being long-winded on top of that," Pawlenty added on a Republican party conference call. "Where's the change?"