Joe Biden: Digging back into his roots to move Obama forward

In York, Pa., he speaks of his father living at the local YMCA. In front of Toledo autoworkers, he calls himself the “son of an automobile man.” In Media, Pa., he is the “grandson of Ambrose Finnegan,” a Scranton ad man turned gas company worker. But he is also the great-grandson, on his mother’s side, of Edward F. Blewitt, a member of the Pennsylvania state Senate. On his paternal side, he is connected to Maryland through a great-great grandfather who sold produce and a grandfather whose transition from Baltimore kerosene salesman to Wilmington oil executive earned the family a temporary taste of wealth. His family was rich in Boston, comfortable in Long Island and broke in Scranton. One relative died in World War II, and another, “Old Man Sheen,” ran shipyards in Virginia.

Vice President Biden, the Obama administration’s traveling everyman, seems to have roots all over. He learned about some of his ancestral connections from stories told at the family dining table, but many details came to him from an unlikely source — a genealogist who burrowed into the cabinets of microfiche and stacks of bound registries at the Mormon church’s vast Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

Gallery

The year in photos: Some of White House Photographer Pete Souza’s picks for best images of the year.

More from PostPolitics

On scandals -- real and imagined

Joel Achenbach

THE FIX | At the moment, the three scandals consuming the Obama administration don't quite measure up to Watergate.

Holder’s claim on the ‘Fast and Furious’ criminal citation

Glenn Kessler

FACT CHECKER | Attorney General Eric Holder said a U.S. attorney made his own decision not to pursue a criminal prosecution of Holder. But he got that wrong.

Part 4: ‘Why don’t you just make yourself legal?’ | Immigration: Pathway to now

VIDEO | The future remains uncertain for 11 million people living illegally in the U.S. Though immigration reform seems closer than it has ever been before, can Washington and the Obama administration effectively repair 30 years of broken policies?

• Immigration: Pathway to now

Read more

“He called me out of the blue to see if I could do his genealogy,” said James W. Petty, a former senior researcher at the library. On a recent afternoon, Petty, wearing a tweed coat and a “certified genealogist” lapel pin, leaned back from the documents spread across a desk overlooking Temple Square. He recalled an initial 2004 conversation with the then-senator inquiring how his ancestors came to the coal mines of Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County and put food on the table.

“I said, part joking, part serious, ‘It’s good for a politician because you can build on this culture, and this culture, and this culture. You can become a favorite son in three or more cultures.’ And he said, ‘I want to approach more people.’ He understood that all of this would affect how he connected with people.”

“He has a great interest in it,” Valerie Biden Owens said of her brother. “Your family gives you, hopefully, roots and wings.”

On Thursday, Biden put all his connections to full use in his debut role as the Obama reelection campaign’s relater in chief. He traveled to Toledo, where he called out Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich by name as being “dead wrong” in their opposition to the autobailout.

“If you give any one of these guys the keys to the White House,” Biden said. “They will bankrupt the middle class again.”

It is a role that the gregarious, relationship-cultivating old pol seems to have been born to play, and one that has already helped his less-experienced and more distant boss negotiate the political ways and means of the capital. A four-decade creature of Washington, Biden works lawmakers, schmoozes donors, levels with conservatives and assures liberal groups. He has emerged as a top administration emissary to troublesome nations and a not-so-private inner-circle dissenter on issues such as health care, Afghanistan and a policy requiring employers to fund contraceptive coverage. Less willingly, he has brought comic relief at times as the nation’s goofy uncle and has provided a soap opera subplot to the no-drama Obama ethos, thanks to the Washington job-swap meshugas in which he and Hillary Clinton switch places.