Biden was born on November 20, 1942, at St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Catherine Eugenia "Jean" Biden (nee Finnegan) and Joseph Robinette "Joe" Biden Sr. He was the first of four siblings in a Catholic family, with a sister, Valerie, and two brothers, James and Frank, following. His mother was of Irish descent, with roots variously attributed to County Louth or County Londonderry. His paternal grandparents, Mary Elizabeth (Robinette) and Joseph H. Biden, an oil businessman from Baltimore, Maryland, were of English, French, and Irish ancestry.

On August 27, 1966, while Biden was still a law student, he married Neilia Hunter. They overcame her parents' initial reluctance for her to wed 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 clerked for six months at a Wilmington law firm headed by prominent local Republican William Prickett and, as he later said, "thought of myself as a Republican". He disliked the conservative racial politics of incumbent Democratic Governor of Delaware Charles L. Terry and supported a more liberal Republican, Russell W. Peterson, who defeated Terry in 1968. The local Republicans tried to recruit him, but he resisted due to his distaste for Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and registered as an Independent instead.  In 1969, Biden resumed practicing law in Wilmington, first as a public defender and then at a firm headed by Sid Balick, a locally active Democrat. Balick named him to the Democratic Forum, a group trying to reform and revitalize the state party, and Biden switched his registration to Democrat. He also started his own firm, Biden and Walsh. Corporate law, however, did not appeal to him and criminal law did not pay well. He supplemented his income by managing properties.  Later in 1969, Biden ran as a Democrat for the New Castle County Council on a liberal platform that included support for public housing in the suburban area. He won by a solid, two-thousand vote margin in the usually Republican district and in a bad year for Democrats in the state. Even before taking his seat, he was already talking about running for the U.S. Senate in a couple of years. He served on the County Council from 1970 to 1972 while continuing his private law practice. Among issues he addressed on the council was his opposition to large highway projects that might disrupt Wilmington neighborhoods, including those related to Interstate 95.  During his first years in the Senate, Biden focused on legislation regarding consumer-protection and environmental issues and called for greater accountability on the part of government. In mid-1974, freshman Senator Biden was named one of the 200 Faces for the Future by Time magazine, in a profile that mentioned what had happened to his family and characterized Biden as "self-confident" and "compulsively ambitious".  Biden became ranking minority member of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1981. In 1984, he was Democratic floor manager for the successful passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act; civil libertarians praised him for modifying some of the Act's provisions, and it was his most important legislative accomplishment at that point in time. He first considered running for president in that year, after he gained notice for giving speeches to party audiences that simultaneously scolded and encouraged Democrats.  Regarding foreign policy, during his first decade in the Senate, Biden focused on arms control issues. In response to the refusal of the U.S. Congress to ratify the SALT II Treaty signed in 1979 by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter, he took the initiative to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, educated him about American concerns and interests, and secured several changes to address objections of the Foreign Relations Committee. When the Reagan administration wanted to interpret the 1972 SALT I Treaty loosely in order to allow the Strategic Defense Initiative to proceed, Biden argued for strict adherence to the treaty's terms. He clashed again with the Reagan administration in 1986 over economic sanctions against South Africa; he received considerable attention when he excoriated Secretary of State George P. Shultz at a Senate hearing because of the administration's support of that country, which continued to practice the apartheid system.  Following his initial election in 1972, Biden was re-elected to six additional terms, in the elections of 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008, usually getting about 60 percent of the vote. He did not face strong opposition; Pete du Pont, then governor, chose not to run against him in 1984. Biden spent 28 years as a junior senator due to the two-year seniority of his Republican colleague William V. Roth Jr. After Roth was defeated for re-election by Tom Carper in 2000, Biden became Delaware's senior senator. He then became the longest-serving senator in Delaware history. In May 1999, Biden set the mark for youngest senator to cast 10,000 votes.  With a net worth between $59,000 and $366,000, and almost no outside income or investment income, Biden was consistently ranked as one of the least wealthy members of the Senate. Biden stated that he was listed as the second poorest member in Congress, a distinction that he was not proud of, but attributed to being elected early in his career. Biden realized early in his senatorial career how vulnerable poorer public officials are to offers of financial contributions in exchange for policy support, and he pushed campaign finance reform measures during his first term.  During his years as a senator, Biden amassed a reputation for loquaciousness, with his questions and remarks during Senate hearings being especially known for being long-winded. He has been a strong speaker and debater and a frequent and effective guest on the Sunday morning talk shows. In public appearances, he is known to deviate from prepared remarks at will. According to political analyst Mark Halperin, he has shown "a persistent tendency to say silly, offensive, and off-putting things"; The New York Times writes that Biden's "weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything". Nor is Biden known for modesty; journalist James Traub has written that "Biden's vanity and his regard for his own gifts seem considerable even by the rarefied standards of the U.S. Senate."  Political writer Howard Fineman has said that, "Biden is not an academic, he's not a theoretical thinker, he's a great street pol. He comes from a long line of working people in Scranton--auto salesmen, car dealers, people who know how to make a sale. He has that great Irish gift." Political columnist David S. Broder has viewed Biden as having grown since he came to Washington and since his failed 1988 presidential bid: "He responds to real people--that's been consistent throughout. And his ability to understand himself and deal with other politicians has gotten much much better." Traub concludes that "Biden is the kind of fundamentally happy person who can be as generous toward others as he is to himself."

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