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Popularity: -2
Vote: | And I think Hillary Clinton is able to be elected president of the United States. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Arafat's departure has created an awesome opportunity. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Because our military power dwarfs that of other countries - we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined - this Administration believes that alliances and international institutions are more of a burden than a benefit. They allow the Lilliputians to tie down Gulliver. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Gonzales's nomination may very well do us more harm internationally because of his relationship with the terror memos and that is a different story. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I do not question the motives of either the neo-conservatives in this Administration who discount the value of alliances and the international institutions we've built or the pure multilateralists in my own Party who believe that we can only exercise power if we get the world's approval first. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I support immediate financial assistance to the newly elected Palestinian president. Now, I don't know what those numbers will be, and I don't know how it's going to be framed. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is my view that we cannot conduct foreign policy at the extremes. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Let's just be smart this time. I'm looking for smart. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it's not about the solvency of Social Security. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The Middle East is hopeful. There's hope there. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact. |
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Biography
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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician. A centrist Democrat and U.S. Senator, Biden has represented Delaware in Congress since 1972. Biden failed in his bid to win the Democratic nomination for President in 1988. Biden has expressed interest in the United States presidency in 2008, and has stopped just short of formally declaring his candidacy. (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/20/biden.2008.ap)
Biden is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime. His experience in foreign policy and arms control issues has won him considerable bipartisan respect.
He is a Roman Catholic.
Biography Senator Biden grew up in New Castle County, Delaware. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, and from the Syracuse University College of Law in 1968. Prior to his election to the Senate, Biden practiced law in Wilmington, Delaware and served on the New Castle County Council from 1970 to 1972. Since 1991, Biden has been an adjunct professor at the Widener University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on constitutional law.
In some political circles, Sen. Biden is one of the more respected voices in the Senate on national security, law and order and civil liberties, and has steadily rebuilt his political reputation after his unfortunate Presidential campaign. First elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, Biden is currently serving his sixth six-year term in office. In the small state of Delaware, Biden is regarded as a highly effective campaigner. During the campaign he was accused of having ties to Iran, being not sufficiently concerned with local issues and making regular gaffes like threatening pilots that he would "screw" them unless they supported one of his proposals.(http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2002/05/19nationalpolitic.html) He was re-elected in 2002 with 58% of the vote, with double the campaign budget of his Republican opponent Ray Clatworthy, a businessman with interests in restaurants and radio stations.
Sen. Biden has been instrumental in crafting significant federal crime laws over the last decade, including the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, also known as the Biden Crime Law. He is also the author of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 2000, which contains a broad array of groundbreaking measures to combat domestic violence and provides billions of dollars in federal funds to address gender-based crimes. Part of this legislation was later struck down as being unconstitutional. He introduced the controversial RAVE Act in the 107th United States Congress.
As chairman of the International Narcotics Control Caucus, Sen. Biden also wrote the laws that created the nation's "Drug Czar" who oversees and coordinated national drug control policy. Sen. Biden continues to work to stop the spread of "date rape" drugs such as Rohypnol, as well as other drugs such as Ecstasy and Ketamine.
Sen. Biden has been a staunch supporter of college aid and loan programs and has crafted legislation to allow families to deduct up to $10,000 per year in higher education expenses on their annual income tax returns. His enacted "Kids 2000" legislation established a public/private partnership to help provide computer centers, teachers, Internet access, and technical training to young people across the nation, particularly to low-income and at-risk youth.
Biden campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 1988, but dropped out of the race amidst scandal. He was found to have plagiarized a speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Biden unsuccessfully defended the plagiarism claims arguing that he had previously correctly credited Kinnock on other occasions but failed to do so in an Iowa speech that was recorded and distributed to reporters by aides to Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee.(http://asp.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/CandidateProfile.aspx?ci=1036&oi=S) It was also revealed that he had plagiarised in law school 20 years earlier when, unaware of the appropriate standards for legal briefs, he'd used a single footnote while lifting five full pages from a legal article. (http://www.nutsandboltsguide.com/plagiarism.html) A series of related problems created a barrage of negative publicity that his candidacy was unable to withstand, including his exaggeration of his academic record during a campaign speech and many other examples of unattributed quotes pilfered from past Democrats through his speeches. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/biden.htm)
In February 1988, he was hospitalized for two brain aneurysms and couldn't return to the Senate until seven months later.
In 2003, Biden was urged by many of his supporters to join the Democratic field of candidates for president. He declined the offer, deciding to devote his time to the Senate rather than the campaign trail, saying he didn't have enough time to cultivate a sufficient fundraising base. Some experts and pundits considered Biden to be a possible running mate for presidential candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election. However, Biden had expressed interest in a Kerry-John McCain ticket. On July 5, 2004, Biden said on CNN that he was uninterested in the vice-presidential nomination. The next day, Kerry picked Senator John Edwards as his running mate. Biden had been discussed as a possible candidate for U.S. Secretary of State in a Kerry-Edwards administration. These discussions were rendered moot by the re-election of President Bush.
His name is mentioned on the long list of possible candidates for President in 2008, and in December 2004 he said he would pursue the possibility, noting "I'm going to proceed as if I'm going to run." (http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20041209/a_biden09.art.htm). He announced in mid-June 2005 that he will seek the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008. Supporters note that he has a friendly outgoing personality, similar in its widespread appeal to George W. Bush's; and he has more than 30 years experience in the Senate, a mark that distinguishes him from many of the newer, less-experienced potential candidates.
A resident of Wilmington, Delaware, Sen. Biden is married to the former Jill Jacobs, and is the father of three children. Sen. Biden has a son who is a first lieutenant in the Delaware Army National Guard and is serving in the Iraqi war. Joseph R. Biden III is a judge advocate.
On the June 20, 2005 edition of Face the Nation, Biden said, "if, in fact, I think that I have a clear shot by this November or December, then I'm going to seek the (2008 Democratic presidential) nomination."
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Joe Biden".
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