A changed Biden finds he's taken seriously

KEOKUK, Iowa - Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. paced before the fireplace in Susan Dunek's living room and chopped the air with his hands as he outlined the legal scholarship on the war-powers clause of the Constitution, part of his answer to a voter's question about the invasion of Iraq.

Then he stopped himself.

"This is boring," the Delaware Democrat said.

"No, it isn't," protested his audience.

"You all are amazing," the senator said. "You're lovely."

In his second campaign for president, Biden, 65, is speaking his mind, giving Iowa voters full paragraphs of context instead of sound bites, making issues seem clear rather than simple. He seems like a man liberated from the promise and tragedy of his past, serene in the shadows thrown by the star wattage of fellow senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady.

To be sure, Biden is flirting with fourth place in what has been, up to now, a three-person Democratic race. Iowans appear to be warming to him in the final days before the Jan. 3 caucuses, the first contests in the race: His crowds are growing, they're listening intently, and many people stay behind for a picture, an autograph, or simply to touch him.

Whatever happens, Biden has earned respect from voters and pundits as serious and thoughtful, a kind of redemption 20 years after his first presidential campaign of airy rhetoric blew up amid accusations of plagiarism. A pair of brain aneurysms nearly killed him in 1988.

By then, he had already endured the death of his wife and young daughter in a car accident in Wilmington just after being elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29. His two sons were injured.

These days, Biden doesn't let much get him down. It's probably the last hurrah for his White House ambitions, and he's enjoying the ride.

"It's so much easier this time, because I really, genuinely know what I believe and what I would do as president - I have a comfort zone," Biden said in an interview on a recent swing through eastern Iowa. "There's not any nobility about it, it's just that I'm OK."

When he ran in 1988, Biden was 44, the candidate of idealism who summoned his baby-boom generation to change the world. It seemed self-conscious to many.

"This is the first campaign I've been in that I haven't run myself," Biden said. "I'm usually the guy who says, 'Let me see the brochure, let me write it, let me change it.' "