Decision at last: Biden for Veep

After keeping America guessing all week, Barack Obama has chosen a fellow senator, Joseph Biden Jr of Delaware, as his vice-presidential candidate. The news was leaked by an anonymous Democratic Party official last night, ahead of a planned text message announcement to party workers and media this morning.

Obama will make his first appearance with his running mate later today at the Old State Capital in Springfield, Illinois, where he launched his presidential bid on a cold winter's morning almost two years ago.

At 65, Joe Biden (pictured) is almost 20 years older than the presidential candidate. He is a fixture in Washington DC where he serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is a working-class Catholic who supports abortion rights and has generally voted liberal.

On the upside, he is familiar with foreign leaders and diplomats and will help fill the gaps in Obama's world experience. On the downside, he has a reputation for being verbose - a "remorseless gabber" as columnist Alexander Cockburn put it on The First Post this week - and is prone to making inappropriate comments for which he then has to apologise.

Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, writing in today's New York Times, recall how Biden was forced to apologise to Obama himself during the early stages of the presidential race when he was running against the Illinois senator for the Democratic nomination (he pulled out after coming only fifth in the Iowa caucus).

Biden described Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy", a remark that was widely criticised for being racially insensitive.

He also declared last year that Obama was not yet ready for the presidency - a line the McCain camp immediately jumped on last night, with spokesman Ben Porrit saying Biden had "denounced Barack Obama's poor foreign policy judgement and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realising - that Barack Obama is not ready to be president."

Biden also ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 presidential race. On that occasion he was forced to quit after being accused of plagiarising a famous speech by Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock ("Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand years to have been to university?"). Shortly afterward, he was found to have suffered two aneurysms.

LAST UPDATED 9:13 AM, AUGUST 23, 2008