Biden time: Just in time for convention, a conventional Joe for an increasingly conventional campaign

Those Obama supporters who were hoping for a jolt of electricity from the Democratic nominee’s vice-presidential pick will have to settle for Joe Biden instead. And to be fair to Obama, it’s not as if anyone he was willing to pick could have upped the amperage much. Hillary was the only figure who might have set Democratic hearts aflutter in large numbers, and she has been off the table for a long time for reasons that may seem remote to most people now. But not Barack Obama. Whether it was her repeated implication that McCain would be a better president, or her wistful public recollection of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, or the prospect that her ambitions would lead her to compromise Obama’s ambitions, Obama did not even extend Clinton the political courtesy of vetting her for VP, as Politico reported late last week.

So what of Biden? Below I’ve compiled a few of the more useful backgrounders on the Delaware senator who Tim Pawlenty, in starting the last week of his own campaign for a VP nod, called “the consummate Washington insider” over the weekend.

Some key points:

There’s scarcely a pundit in the land who has not paid lip service to Biden’s main selling point, his foreign policy credentials. He’s been a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for over 30 years, and is currently serving his second stint as chair. Broadly speaking, he’s a self-styled “muscular” Democrat in foreign affairs, favoring interventionist policies wherever US economic interests are at stake. He voted in favor of Iraq War authorization — in August 2002, Biden said the US had “no choice but to eliminate” Saddam — and later joined the chorus of Democrats who claimed they had no idea the Bush administration would use the mandate as it did.

Domestically, Biden has been an almost archetypal law and order Democrat. According to his own biography page, “As a long-standing member and former Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Biden is a strong leader on crime and drug policy and has been instrumental in crafting almost every major piece of crime legislation over the past two decades.” He is thus one of the architects of America’s growing prison population, and was a leading voice on the Democratic side of the aisle calling for the creation of a “drug czar” position in government back in the ’90s.

Regarding anti-terrorism policy and civil liberties, Biden has voted against some of the expansions of executive power passed in recent years. He opposed the FISA Amendments bill that Obama himself supported earlier this summer. But for perspective’s sake, remember that Joe Biden has also been known to boast that the PATRIOT Act was based largely on his work. Glenn Greenwald quotes this passage from a 2001 New Republic piece; the emphasis is Greenwald’s:

In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Biden did, in fact, champion an anti-terrorism bill similar to the one now before Congress (though it was, as he complains, badly watered down by anti-government conservatives and leftist civil libertarians). And Biden doesn’t let you forget it. “I introduced the terrorism bill in ’94 that had a lot of these things in it,” he bragged to NBC’s Tim Russert on September 30. When I spent the day with him later that week, Biden mentioned the legislation to me, and to several other reporters he encountered, no fewer than seven times. “When I was chairman in ’94 I introduced a major antiterrorism bill–back then,” he says in the morning, flashing a knowing grin and pausing for effect. (Never mind that he’s gotten the year wrong.) Back in his office later that afternoon, he brings it up yet again. “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill.”

Biden’s footprint on economic policy is fainter than his imprint on foreign affairs and the judiciary, but in this time of credit crunches and massive private as well as public debt, it bears noting that Biden’s single largest campaign contributor through the years has been the credit card giant MBNA and its corporate forebears; MBNA is based in Biden’s Delaware in part because of that state’s anything-goes approach to credit deregulation. And Biden was a major backer of the credit industry’s push to tighten personal bankruptcy rules — in 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill; in 2001, when it was derailed by a fight over amendments; and in 2005, when it finally passed.

More: “Capital Eye: The Money Behind Biden,” Open Secrets/Center for Responsive Politics; “The Good and the Bad of Joe Biden,” Undernews; “Biden’s views on liberal Democrats,” TalkLeft; Almanac of American Politics 2008 on Biden, National Journal; “Rhetorical Question,” a 2001 Biden profile from New Republic; “Biden for dummies,” Politico.