From his position on the Foreign Relations Committee, he cooperated extensively with several Republicans, including the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, with whom Biden worked on a major chemical weapons treaty.
The high-profile committee hearings and television appearances that Biden sought so assiduously never seemed to help his political fortunes nationally. He was crushed in both his presidential bids, in 1988 and this year.
And Biden never really became a Washington insider. He is not a major fundraiser in the Beltway and gets relatively little money from political action committees. Among his biggest supporters have been employees of MBNA, a Delaware-based credit card giant recently bought by Bank of America.
Biden doesn't move in the Washington cocktail circuit. And when he remarried and started a family with his second wife, Jill, he still returned home to Delaware nearly every night.
"He knew every conductor on the train," said Mark Gitenstein, who worked for Biden for 13 years and remains close to him.
To this day, Gitenstein and others who know him say, Biden keeps up with the people back home.
One is J.D. Howell, a former chief at the Mill Creek volunteer fire company outside Wilmington.
In 1988, Biden suffered a brain aneurysm. Howell was a member of the ambulance crew that rushed him from Delaware to a Washington hospital, where doctors performed lifesaving surgery.
Fifteen years later, long after Biden had bounced back, Howell was diagnosed with advanced stage lymphoma. Biden called immediately.
"The man was practically at my doorstep," Howell recalled Saturday before reading a letter the senator sent him at the time. "You wouldn't let me quit on that fateful night . . . ," Biden wrote. "Now it is my turn."
When his fellow firefighters held a benefit for Howell, Biden and his wife came to preside.
"It was kind of an emotional thing," Howell said, "because Joe knows what it's like to be down and out."
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noam.levey@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Dan Morain in Sacramento and Chuck Neubauer in Washington contributed to this report.
