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Jill themselves,” Michelle remembered. Beau’s Natalie and Robert, plus Hunter’s Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy, absorbed the Obamas’ daughters into their noisy, excited bunch.

During the Democratic National Convention in late August, the Biden family was showcased. Beau, attorney general of Delaware, soon to be sent to Iraq with the National Guard, proudly introduced his father.

Joe Biden in turn proudly introduced Hunter, Ashley, and Jill, joking that his wife was “the only one who leaves me breathless and speechless at the same time.” And as he talked to the audience about his family background, he introduced Jean Finnegan Biden, his ninety-one-year-old mother. Sadly, his father had not lived to see this moment.

That night at the convention, Joe’s granddaughter Finnegan, ten years old, asked Joe if Malia and Sasha Obama, ten and seven, could sleep over with the Biden kids. Later that night, Biden checked the children’s room in the Bidens’ hotel suite. He was touched to see them all in their sleeping bags, “cuddled together.” He felt sure he’d made the right decision in joining forces with the young senator from Illinois.

As they plunged into the final two months of the 2008 race, Obama appreciated Joe Biden’s experience with political campaigns. Biden might have a reputation as a motormouth, but he was a skilled campaigner. Obama’s staff were impressed that Biden could campaign in a disciplined way, keeping the spotlight on the candidate for president rather than on himself.

Biden launched his race for vice president with a trip to his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On Labor Day, Joe and his mother visited the old Finnegan house on North Washington Avenue, where a woman named Anne Kearns lived with her family. They were thrilled to welcome Senator and Jean Biden to a backyard picnic. As Joe toured the house, they urged him to sign the wall of the attic room where he used to sleep.

I Am Home, Biden wrote with a Sharpie. Joe Biden, 9-1-08. Then he joked, “If my father was here, he’d smack me for writing on the wall.”

The Republican candidate for president was Senator John McCain of Arizona, a force on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a war hero to boot. He had served in the Senate with Joe Biden for more than twenty years. They were close friends, in spite of their political differences.

But that didn’t mean that Biden would go easy on McCain. On the campaign trail, he hammered at the idea that a President McCain would be four more years of the unpopular George W. Bush. Under President Bush, the country was suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. People were losing their homes to risky mortgages, and as unemployment soared, people also lost their health insurance. But the government bailed out big banks, which enraged ordinary citizens.

McCain had chosen Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential candidate. At first this announcement gave McCain a bump upward in the polls. But by late September the Obama-Biden team had pulled ahead.

Obama and his campaign team had known from the beginning that Joe Biden talked too much. Back in 2005, when Obama attended his first Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, that was his main impression of Senator Biden. “Man, that guy can just talk and talk.” Worse, maybe as a side effect of talking so much, Biden made gaffes—like the one about Obama being “clean” and “articulate.”

So Obama expected that Joe would make some gaffes during the campaign, and that the media would be waiting to pounce on each one. That was part of the package of Joe Biden. As the campaign went on and Biden did put his foot into his mouth, and the media did jump on it, Obama treated each occasion as no big deal.

Until a fundraising event in October, when Joe, going off script, told the audience, “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.” This remark seemed to echo what Biden had said during the Democratic primary debates, suggesting that Obama wasn’t “ready” to be president. (Of course, back in 1972, people in Delaware had wondered if a twenty-nine-year-old county councilman named Joe Biden was “ready” to be their senator.)

Biden was only speaking from his experience in foreign relations, where some crisis or other was always coming along. He meant that there was bound to be an international crisis at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, and that the crisis would prove the new president’s leadership.

However, the McCain campaign was delighted to quote—and misinterpret—Biden’s unnecessary remark. They were already making the point that Obama was inexperienced in foreign policy, and Biden’s words seemed to show that even Obama’s running mate thought so. “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?” wondered Obama to his aides.

But by that time, Obama was ahead of McCain in the polls, and he stayed ahead up through Election Day, November 4. That historic evening, the Obamas and the Bidens were staying in the same hotel in Chicago, watching the election returns. At ten o’clock the TV networks announced the winner: Barack Obama. The Bidens burst into the Obamas’ room, everyone yelling and hugging each other.

On the bright, cold day of January 20, 2009, Joe Biden stood on the steps of the Capitol. The crowds for the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American president, were the biggest ever, for any event in Washington, DC. Jill held the Biden family Bible while Joe took the oath of office as vice president of the United States. Hunter and Ashley stood by, beaming. So did Beau, on special leave from his National Guard assignment in Iraq.

Now Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president, the office Joe Biden had set out to win two years before. Biden was just as ambitious and confident as Obama, and he knew it would be hard for him, after his years of leadership in the Senate, to call someone else boss. But he didn’t intend to be a