Joseph Biden Jr. is Delaware’s longest serving Senator. Biden was elected to office in 1972, just weeks before his 30th birthday, making him among the youngest Senators in history. Since then he’s won re-reelection five times, generally by a wide margin. His 35 years of congressional tenure include service on the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (which he currently chairs) and the Committee on the Judiciary, two of the oldest in the Senate.
Put another way; Joe Biden has been in Washington since Barack Obama was 11 years old.
To further acquaint you with this vice presidential hopeful, here are five things you didn’t know about Joe Biden.
1- Joe Biden survived a brain aneurysm
In the winter of 1988 Joe Biden was chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Supreme Court nominee Anthony Kennedy when he began to experience neck pain. The pain worsened and was joined by other problems, including nausea. Eventually, Joe Biden went to the hospital.
Turns out Biden had what’s called a berry aneurysm at the base of his brain that was leaking blood into the space between his brain and the brain’s protective lining. An emergency, six-hour surgery at Walter Reed Medical Center took care of the problem and in this regard Joe Biden lucked out, since most people with a brain aneurysm get no advanced warning -- it simply bursts, resulting in paralysis, mental impairment, coma or death.
2- Joe Biden's son is going to Iraq
Joe Biden’s oldest son, 39-year-old Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III, is not only Delaware’s Attorney General but he is also a Captain in the Delaware Army National Guard's Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, assigned to the 261st Signal Brigade in Smyrna, Delaware. Beau Biden and the 261st are being deployed to Iraq on October 3, the day after his father participates in the first vice presidential debate.
According to the Wilmington News Journal, Beau Biden’s job with the 261st is as a military lawyer who offers “legal advice on disciplining soldiers” and who advises “commanders and soldiers on issues such as wills and powers of attorney.” Their deployment is expected to last a year.
As for Joe Biden, he isn’t thrilled about his son’s deployment. Ever since he voted to authorize the use of force in 2002, Joe Biden has been one of the war’s more vocal critics.
3- Joe Biden is a member of the Alfalfa Club
Another thing you didn’t know about Joe Biden is his affiliation with one of Washington’s most secretive and elite clubs, the Alfalfa Club.
In 1913, a group of Southerners founded the Alfalfa Club in Washington D.C., allegedly for no other reason than to have an annual dinner on the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in late January.
Today, the secretive Alfalfa Club (journalists are barred from attending the dinner) has around 200 members. Most of them are part of Washington’s wealthy and elite. Along with Joe Biden, they include President Bush, his brothers and his father; Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; a number of both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, state Governors and mayors; and some not directly involved in politics, such as Michael Dell.
4- Joe Biden was a below-average college student
Joe Biden completed his undergraduate work at the University of Delaware, but he didn’t do so in any exceptional manner. In his first three semesters he scored mostly Cs and Ds, and even an F in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). For about 100 years, starting in 1862, an ROTC class, which taught mechanics, military tactics, etc. was compulsory for most male U.S. college students. Only in physical education classes did Biden receive As.
His academic record didn’t improve much while at Syracuse College of Law either, where he graduated 76th in a class of 85.
5- Joe Biden drives a 1967 Corvette
The last thing you didn’t know about Joe Biden is what kind of wheels the man has.
Joe Biden’s current wife is his second; his first wife, Neilia, passed away, along with the couple’s daughter, in a car accident shortly after his initial election to the Senate in 1972. Joe and Neilia Biden were married on August 27, 1966, in Skaneateles, New York, and his father -- a car salesman -- gave his son a sweet wedding gift: a brand new 1967 Chevy Corvette, a car he still owns today.
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