(Joe Biden) Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., born November 20, 1942, is an American politician who served as the 47th Vice President of the United States from 2009 to 2017 and represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009.
A member of the Democratic Party, Biden is running for president in the 2020 election. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008.
Joe Biden grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle County, Delaware. He studied at the University of Delaware before receiving his law degree from Syracuse University.
He became a lawyer in 1969 and was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970. He was first elected to the US Senate in Delaware in 1972 when he became the sixth youngest senator in US history. The USA. Biden was re-elected six times and was the fourth-longest-serving senator when he stepped down to become vice president in 2009.
Joe Biden was a former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991, but advocated US and NATO intervention in the Bosnian War in 1994 and 1995. He voted for the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the US troop surge in 2007. He has also served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which deals with issues related to drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties, as well as the controversial nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court of the United States. Joe Biden led efforts to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act.
In 2008, Joe Biden was the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. He became the first Roman Catholic to serve as Vice President of the United States. As vice president, Biden oversaw infrastructure spending aimed at countering the Great Recession and helped shape US policy toward Iraq by withdrawing US troops in 2011. His negotiations with Congress Republicans helped the Obama administration pass legislation including tax relief, unemployment insurance reauthorization, and the Job Creation Act of 2010, which resolved a fiscal impasse; the Budget Control Act of 2011, which resolved the debt ceiling crisis of that year; and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which addressed the looming fiscal cliff. Obama and Biden were re-elected in 2012.
In October 2015, after months of speculation, Biden announced that he would not seek the presidency in the 2016 election. In January 2017, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction. After completing his second term as vice president, Biden joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Finally, after initially hesitating, he announced his candidacy for the 2020 presidency on April 25, 2019.
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Biden Youth
Biden’s father was wealthy but had suffered several financial setbacks when his son was born. For several years, the family had to live with Biden’s maternal grandparents, the Finnegans. When the Scranton area fell into economic decline during the 1950s, Biden’s father was unable to find steady employment. In 1953, the Biden family moved into an apartment in Claymont, Delaware, where they lived for several years before moving back to a house in Wilmington, Delaware. Joe Biden Sr. he subsequently became a successfully used car salesman, maintaining the family’s middle-class circumstances.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden was studying at Archmere Academy in the 1950s.
Biden attended Archmere Academy in Claymont, where he was a standout midfielder and wide receiver for his high school football team; he helped lead a perennial underdog team to an undefeated season his senior year. He also played on the baseball team. During these years, he participated in an anti-segregation sit-in at a Wilmington theater.
Academically, he was a poor student and was considered a natural leader among the students, being elected class president during his junior and senior years. He graduated in 1961.
Joe Biden Studies
He received his bachelor’s degree in 1965 from the University of Delaware, with a double major in history and political science, graduating with a class rank of 506 out of 688. His classmates were impressed by his athletic skills and he played midfield for the Blue First-year hens from the football team. In 1964, during spring break in the Bahamas, he met and began dating Neilia Hunter, who was from a wealthy background in Skaneateles, New York, and attended Syracuse University. He told her that he intended to become a senator at the age of 30 and then president. He passed up a junior year plan to play for the varsity football team as a defenseman, which allowed him to spend more time visiting the state with her.
He then entered Syracuse University School of Law where he received a half scholarship based on financial need with some additional assistance based on academics.
By his own description, he found law school to be “the world’s biggest bore.” During his first year there, he was accused of plagiarizing five pages of a 15-page law review article. Biden said he went unnoticed because he didn’t know the proper citation rules, and was allowed to retake the course after receiving an “F” grade, which was later removed from his record. This incident attracted attention when new accusations of plagiarism surfaced in 1987. He received his Juris Doctor in 1968, graduating 76th out of 85 in his class. Biden was admitted to the Delaware Bar Association in 1969. He received student drafts during this period, at the height of the Vietnam War and in 1968, he was reclassified by the Selective Service System as unavailable for duty due to having asthma as a teenager. He never participated in anti-war demonstrations, later saying that at the time he was preoccupied with marriage and law school, and “wore sports coats…not tie-dyes.”
He has struggled with stuttering throughout his life, especially in his childhood and early twenties, and stated that he has helped reduce the problem by spending many hours reciting poetry in front of a mirror. However, he still continues to struggle with stuttering, and it has been suggested that this has affected his performance in Democratic debates during his 2020 campaign for the presidency.
Negative impressions of drinking alcohol in the Biden and Finnegan families and in the neighborhood led Joe Biden not to drink.
The beginnings of his political career and family life
On August 27, 1966, while Biden was still a law student, he married Neilia Hunter (1942-1972). They overcame her parents’ initial reluctance to marry a Roman Catholic, and the ceremony was held in a Catholic church in Skaneateles. . They had three children, Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III in 1969, Robert Hunter in 1970, and Naomi Christina in 1971.
During 1968, Biden worked for six months at a Wilmington law firm headed by prominent local Republican William Prickett and, as he later put it, “considered myself a Republican.”
He disliked the conservative racial policies of Democratic incumbent Delaware Governor Charles L. Terry and supported a more liberal Republican, Russell W. Peterson, who defeated Terry in 1968. Local Republicans tried to recruit him, but he resisted because of u distaste for Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and registered as an independent instead.
In 1969, Biden returned to practicing law in Wilmington, first as a public defender and later in a firm headed by Sid Balick, a locally active Democrat. Balick appointed him to the Democratic Forum, a group trying to reform and reinvigorate the party in the state, and Biden changed his registration to a Democrat. He also started his own firm, Biden and Walsh. However, corporate law did not appeal to him and criminal law did not pay well, so he supplemented his income by managing estates.
Later in 1969, Biden ran as a Democrat for New Castle County Council on a liberal platform that included support for suburban public housing. She won by a solid 2,000-vote margin in the generally Republican district and in a bad year for Democrats in the state. Even before she took his seat, she was already talking about running for the United States Senate in a couple of years. She served on the County Council from 1970 to 1972 while continuing her private law practice. Biden represented the fourth district on the county council. Among the issues, he addressed in council was his opposition to large highway projects that could disrupt Wilmington neighborhoods, including those related to Interstate 95.
1988 presidential campaign
Joe Biden ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, formally declaring his candidacy at the Wilmington train station on June 9, 1987. He was bidding to become the youngest president since John F. Kennedy.
When the campaign began, he was considered a potentially strong candidate because of his moderate image, his stump-talking ability, his appeal to Baby Boomers, and his high-profile position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the next Supreme Court Robert Bork, his nomination hearings and his fundraising appeal. He raised $1.7 million in the first quarter of 1987, more than any other candidate.
By August 1987, the Biden campaign, whose message was muddled by staff rivalries, had begun to lag behind those of Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt, although it had still raised more funds than all the candidates except Dukakis and he was seeing an uptick in the Iowa polls. In September 1987, the campaign ran into trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech given earlier that year by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labor Party. Kinnock’s speech included the lines:
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to make it to college? [Then pointing to his wife in the audience] Why is Glenys the first woman in his family in a thousand generations to be able to go to college? Was it because all of our predecessors were of a thick build?
While Biden’s speech included the lines:
“I started thinking when I was coming here, why is Joe Biden the first in his family to go to college? [Then pointing to his wife in the audience] Why is my wife, who is sitting in the audience, the first in her family to go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and graduate degree and he was smarter than the rest?
In fact, Biden had cited Kinnock as the source for formulating his ideas on previous occasions. But he made no reference to the original source in the reported Aug. 23 Democratic debate at the Iowa State Fair, nor in an Aug. 26 interview for the National Education Association. Additionally, while political speeches often hijack ideas and language, Biden’s use came under increased scrutiny because he fabricated aspects of his own family’s background to match Kinnock’s. It was soon discovered that excerpts from a 1967 Robert F. Kennedy speech (for which his aides claimed responsibility), and a short sentence from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, had been excerpted earlier that year; and two years earlier it was discovered that his assistants had done the same thing to a 1976 passage by Hubert H. Humphrey.
A few days later, Biden’s law school plagiarism incident came to light. A video was also posted showing that when asked earlier by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school, he had said that he graduated in the “top half” of his school class and that he had attended law school. law on a full scholarship, and that he had received three college degrees, claims that were false or exaggerations of his actual record.
Advisors and reporters pointed out that he falsely claimed to have marched in the Civil Rights Movement.
The Kinnock and school revelations were magnified by the limited amount of other news about the nomination race at the time when most of the public was not yet paying attention to either campaign; Joe Biden thus fell into what The Washington Post writer Paul Taylor described as the trend of that year, a “judgment by the media.”
Biden lacked a strong demographic or political support group to help him survive the crisis. He withdrew from the nominating race on September 23, 1987, saying that his candidacy had been overrun by “the exaggerated shadow” of his past mistakes.
After Biden dropped out of the race, it was revealed that the Dukakis campaign had secretly made a video highlighting the Biden-Kinnock comparison and distributed it to the media. Later, in 1987, the Delaware Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Responsibility dismissed charges of plagiarism from his law school record in reference to Biden’s position as an attorney, saying that he “had not violated any rule”.
Joe Biden in the US Senate
After his presidential run, Joe Biden worked extensively in the United States Senate. He has been re-elected Senator five consecutive times (1978, 1984, 1990, 1996 and 2002), being to date the person who has served the longest in the Senate for the State of Delaware. He has been prominent primarily in the Justice Committee and the International Relations Committee.
Biden as Vice President of Barack Obama
Vice Presidential campaign in 2008
In 2008, Biden participated in the race for the nomination in the Democratic Party, but he did not obtain enough support to compete solidly against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, so he gave up his aspiration.
Shortly after Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, Obama privately told Biden that he was interested in finding an important place for Biden in a possible Obama administration. Biden rejected Obama’s first request to vet him for the vice president position, fearing that the vice presidency would represent a loss of status and voice for his position in the Senate, but later changed his mind. In a June 22, 2008 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Biden confirmed that, although he was not actively seeking a place on the ticket, he would accept the vice presidential nomination if offered.
In early August, Obama and Biden met in secret to discuss a possible vice presidential relationship, and the two developed a strong personal relationship.
On August 22, 2008, Barack Obama announced that Biden would be his running mate. The New York Times reported that the strategy behind the choice reflected a desire to fill out the ticket with someone who had a foreign policy and national security experience.
Other observers noted Biden’s appeal to middle-class and blue-collar voters, as well as his willingness to aggressively challenge Republican candidate John McCain in a way that Obama was sometimes uncomfortable with.
By accepting Obama’s offer, Biden ruled out the possibility of running for president again in 2016 (although Biden’s comments in subsequent years seemed to back down on that stance, as Biden did not want to diminish his political power). Biden was officially nominated for vice president on August 27 by voice vote at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.
After his selection as the vice-presidential candidate, his own Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington confirmed that even if the elected vice president, Biden would not be allowed to speak in Catholic schools. The bishop of his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, soon banned Biden from receiving Holy Communion because of his support for women’s abortion rights; however, Biden continued to receive Communion at his local Delaware parish.
Scranton became a flashpoint in the contest for state Catholic voters wavering between the Democratic campaign and liberal Catholic groups, who stressed that other social issues should be considered as much or more than abortion, and many conservative bishops and Catholics, who maintained abortion among the main issues.
Biden stated that he believed that life began at conception, but that he would not impose his personal religious views on others.
Bishop Saltarelli had previously stated regarding positions similar to those of Biden:
“Nobody today would accept this statement from any public servant: ‘I am personally opposed to human slavery and racism, but I will not impose my personal conviction in the legislative arena.’ Similarly, none of us should accept this statement from any public servant: “I am personally opposed to abortion but I will not impose my personal conviction in the legislative arena.”
Vice presidency
On November 4, 2008, Biden was elected Vice President of the United States as Obama’s running mate.
Shortly after the election, he was named chairman of President-elect Obama’s transition team. During the transition phase of the Obama administration, Biden said that he was in daily meetings with Obama and that McCain remained his friend. The United States Secret Service code name given to Biden is “Celtic”, referencing his Irish roots.
Biden chose veteran attorney and Democratic aide Ron Klain as his chief of staff, [and Time magazine Washington bureau chief Jay Carney as his communications director.] Biden intended to cut some of the roles explicit assumptions made by the vice presidency of his predecessor, Dick Cheney, who had established himself as an autonomous center of power.
Biden said he would not emulate any previous vice president, but instead would seek to provide advice on every critical decision Obama would make. Biden said that he was closely involved in all the cabinet appointments that were made during the transition.
Biden was also named to head the new White House Task Force on Working Families, an initiative aimed at improving the economic well-being of the middle class. In his last act as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden made a trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan during the second week of January 2009, meeting with the leaders of those countries.
Life of Joe Biden after the vice presidency to the present
In 2017, Biden was named Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he intended to focus on foreign policy, diplomacy, and national security while directing the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. He too wanted to pursue his “stellar strike on cancer” agenda, calling the fight against cancer “the only bipartisan thing left in America” in March 2017.
Biden had been a close friend of Sen. John McCain for more than 30 years. In 2018, McCain died at the age of 81 after dealing with same cancer that Joe Biden’s late son, Beau Biden, died of. Biden delivered the eulogy at McCain’s funeral in Phoenix, Arizona. He opened with “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat and I loved John McCain.” He also called him a “brother.” Biden also served as a pallbearer at McCain’s memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral alongside Warren Beatty and Michael Bloomberg.
2020 presidential campaign
On July 15, 2019, the nonprofit Biden Cancer Initiative announced that the foundation would cease operations for the foreseeable future. Biden and his wife left the initiative’s board in April as an ethical precaution before beginning his 2020 presidential campaign.
In September 2019, it was reported that President Trump had been pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Despite the allegations, as of September 2019, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. This push to investigate the Bidens was widely interpreted by the media as an attempt to harm Biden’s chances of winning the presidency, resulting in a political scandal and the House’s fight to impeach Donald Trump.
Throughout 2019, Biden led his Democratic rivals in national polls and was widely considered the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary. However, after disappointing showings in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in early 2020, he fell to second place behind Bernie Sanders in a February 2020 poll. However, he won the popular vote in the North Carolina primary. South, ahead of Sanders.
Beginning in 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies falsely accused Biden of having Ukrainian Attorney General Viktor Shokin fired because he was apparently conducting an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a company that employed Biden’s son Hunter. Biden was accused of withholding $1 billion in aid from Ukraine in this effort.
In 2015, then-Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian parliament to remove Shokin because the United States, the European Union, and other international organizations viewed him as corrupt and ineffective, and notably failing to assertively investigate Burisma. The withholding of the $1 billion in aid was part of this official White House policy.
After his victory in the Super Tuesday primaries, on March 3, 2020, Biden received the support of Michael Bloomberg, who until then had been a candidate for the nomination by the Democratic party.
Joe Biden’s economic thinking
This section collects Joe Biden’s political positions on economic matters, as well as his economic thinking.
Agriculture
As a senator, Biden supported the farm bill and believes it is a responsible compromise.
He has strongly supported efforts to combat the problem of invasive species – plants and animals improperly brought to US shores. Biden feels that these non-native species have the potential to be among the greatest economic and environmental threats in the 21st century. Non-native species disturb vegetation, compete with native species, introduce new diseases, and interfere with maritime trade. Aware of these dangers, Senator Biden continued to support programs used to stop importing non-native plants and animals into the US.
After learning that Russia will begin banning chicken imports from 19 plants in the United States, Biden issued the following statement:
Once again, Russia is using non-tariff barriers as an excuse to close its markets to US poultry. I am concerned about the effect of this action on Mountaire, a major employer and an integral part of our state’s agricultural production. Other local poultry processing plants may be attacked! Russia has repeatedly shown that it is not ready to comply with the rules of international trade. Let us not forget that this is part of a larger picture, in which Russia has not behaved as a responsible member of the international community. Until Russia reverses its recent actions, both large and small, its application to join the World Trade Organization should remain on hold.
The United States must take immediate and necessary action, just as we did in 2002, to restore access to this market, which is critical to Delaware farmers, the Delaware poultry industry, and the Delaware economy, which relies heavily on the agricultural industry.
Against the banking sector
During the 2000s, Biden sponsored bankruptcy legislation, which was sought by MBNA, one of Delaware’s largest companies and Biden’s largest contributor in the late 1990s, and other credit card issuers.
He fought for certain amendments to the bill that would indirectly protect homeowners and prohibit criminals from using bankruptcy to evade fines.
He also worked to defeat amendments that would have protected members of the military and those bankrupted by medical debt.
Critics raised concerns that the law would force those seeking bankruptcy protection to hire attorneys to process the required paperwork and make it more difficult for students to discharge education-related debts.
The umbrella bill was vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 but was eventually passed as the Consumer Protection and Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act in 2005, with the support of Biden.
Energy
Biden opposes oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and supports government funding to find new sources of energy, as well as increasing funding for alternative transportation like Amtrak and mass transit.
While campaigning for president in 2007, Biden said that, if elected, his top priority would be “energy security.” He was also quoted as saying, “If I could wave a wand and the Lord said I could solve a problem, I would solve the energy crisis.”
Trade and globalization
Biden was one of the Democrats who voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993.
He opposed the Free Trade Agreement between the Dominican Republic and Central America (CAFTA), but supports the normalization of relations with China, Vietnam and the Andean nations. He opposes free trade agreements with Oman, Singapore and Chile.
Biden received a 42% approval rating from the Cato Institute, showing a mixed record on free trade. It received a 32% approval rating from the United States Chamber of Commerce. He is in favor of taking the burden off corporations to avoid outsourcing. He voted to repeal tax subsidies for companies that outsource jobs.