For Senator, Another Comeback

By the beginning of 2005, Biden had refurbished his image well enough to mull another presidential campaign. He built a staff filled with loyal friends -- people who knew all too well that a Biden campaign would inevitably have highs and lows -- and united the group by repeating a message: Finally, it was his time.

But Biden's trademark tendency to make off-the-cuff remarks resurfaced almost immediately. On the day in January 2007 that he announced his candidacy, he told an interviewer that Obama was "the first mainstream African American [presidential candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Biden later called Obama to assure him he had meant no offense. But the remark still haunted him during a presidential debate last December. "It may be possible, because I speak so bluntly, that people misunderstand," Biden said that night.

The following month, after his anemic showing in the Iowa caucuses, he gathered his campaign staff to break the news that he would drop out of the race. His aides were dejected, a former Senate chief of staff recalled. But Biden told them not to worry. Better things would come, he said.

And sure enough, when Obama introduced his running mate yesterday at Illinois' old statehouse, to the strains of Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising," Biden came running up the steps.

Staff researchers Lucy Shackelford and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.