page_title: Joe Biden
section_title: Vice Presidency (2009–2017)
hierarchical_section_title: Joe Biden / Vice Presidency (2009–2017)
caption_attribution_description: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden shake hands in the Oval Office following a phone call with House Speaker John Boehner securing a bipartisan deal to reduce the nation's deficit and avoid default, Sunday, July 31, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
context_page_description: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is an American politician who served as the 47th vice president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He served as a United States Senator for Delaware from 1973 to 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2020 election, running against the incumbent, Donald Trump. Biden unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008.
  Biden was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle County, Delaware. He studied at the University of Delaware before receiving his law degree from Syracuse University. He became a lawyer in 1969 and was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972, becoming the sixth-youngest senator in American history. Biden was a longtime member and eventually chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991 but supported the expansion of the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe and its intervention in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. He supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007.
context_section_description: Soon after the 2008 election, Biden was appointed chairman of president-elect Obama's transition team. Biden chose veteran Democratic lawyer and aide Ron Klain as his chief of staff and Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney as his director of communications. He said he intended to eliminate some of the explicit roles assumed by his predecessor and would not emulate any previous vice presidency.
  At noon on January 20, 2009, Biden became the 47th vice president of the United States. In the early months of the Obama administration, Obama compared Biden's efforts to a basketball player "who does a bunch of things that don't show up in the stat sheet". Biden lost an internal debate to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding his opposition to sending 21,000 new troops to the war in Afghanistan, but his skepticism was still considered valuable in the administration. Biden visited Iraq about every two months, and had made eight trips there. Biden was also in charge of the oversight role for infrastructure spending from the Obama stimulus package intended to help counteract the ongoing recession.
  In late April 2009, Biden's off-message response to a question during the beginning of the swine flu outbreak (that he would advise family members against traveling on airplanes or subways) led to a swift retraction by the White House. The remark revived Biden's reputation for gaffes. On March 23, 2010, Biden told the president that his signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was "a big fucking deal". Despite their different personalities, Obama and Biden formed a friendship.
  Members of the Obama administration said Biden's role in the White House was to be a contrarian and force others to defend their positions. Obama said, "The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me." On June 11, 2010, Biden represented the United States at the opening ceremony of the World Cup.
  Biden campaigned heavily for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. Following big Republican gains in the elections and the departure of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Biden's past relationships with Republicans in Congress became more important. In March 2011, Obama delegated Biden to lead negotiations between Congress and the White House in resolving federal spending levels for the rest of the year and avoiding a government shutdown. By May 2011, a "Biden panel" with six congressional members was trying to reach a bipartisan deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling as part of an overall deficit reduction plan. The U.S. debt ceiling crisis relied on Biden's relationship with McConnell, which proved a key factor in breaking the deadlock and finally bringing about a deal to resolve it, in the form of the Budget Control Act of 2011. One Republican staffer said, "Biden's the only guy with real negotiating authority, and [McConnell] knows that his word is good. He was a key to the deal."
  Some reports suggest that Biden opposed going forward with the May 2011 U.S. mission to kill Osama bin Laden. He took the lead in notifying Congressional leaders of the successful outcome.
caption: President Obama congratulates Biden for his role in shaping the debt ceiling deal which led to the Budget Control Act of 2011.
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