Campaign Curriculum

"But look what happened when we got out," says Val. "He continued the confirmation hearings of [Robert] Bork and was very critical in determining the makeup of the Supreme Court."

The story of how Jill and Joe met is also framed by tragedy. Joe's first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter died in a car crash in 1972, six weeks after he was elected to the Senate at the age of 29. Their sons, Beau and Hunter, wound up in the hospital, Beau in a full body cast. Joe had to be persuaded to start his first term.

A few years later, Biden saw several ads for the New Castle County park system in the Wilmington airport. They were shots of the parks, with a blond young woman in them. He thought she was gorgeous. That was Jill, a 23-year-old senior at the University of Delaware who'd agreed to pose for a photographer friend of hers.

The way Joe tells it, that very night he came home, and his brother Frankie gave him the phone number of a girl he thought Joe would like. Joe called her the next day. When he picked her up, he was astonished to see who it was: the gorgeous blond girl in the ads.

They began dating. It was the boys who first suggested to Joe that "we think we should marry Jill." Joe asked her five or six times. She was nine years younger, she'd been married briefly before and she was not big into the idea of being a political wife. She worried she wasn't ready to be a mom to the boys. When she at last agreed, it was a wedding for the four of them. They were married in 1977.

The boys stood on the altar with them during the ceremony and joined them on their honeymoon. In time, they took to calling her Mom.

The Call Finally Comes

When Obama called in June to let Joe know he was in the running, the Bidens called another family meeting.

"We never ever thought -- I mean we didn't even think about it -- that he would be chosen for vice president," Jill says. She's a runner, and she's tiny. Today she wears a red suit jacket and, around her neck, the diamond horseshoe pendant that her three children and two daughters-in-law gave her when she earned her doctorate.

As the papers reported at the time, the day in August that Joe found out, he happened to be with Jill at the dentist's, where she was getting a root canal. Afterward, she went out to the car.

"And no sooner had I closed the door and turned to him that he said, 'Jill, Barack called me and asked me to be vice president.' And of course I was just so happy and, you know, starting to cry, but I could barely laugh because my mouth was so numb."

By then she'd just started classes, and she hoped she could still teach: "I felt it was my job." She says she spoke with Michelle Obama after Joe was chosen and said, "I would like to be in the classroom four days a week and then I'll travel," and that Michelle said, great, because she herself was campaigning during the week and trying to be home with her kids on weekends.

"So, you see, our schedules would mesh beautifully," Jill says, and the campaigning thing would all work out. And if the Obama-Biden ticket wins, that would mean moving to D.C. and figuring out whether she might like to teach at a community college down in the capital. Because, she says, she would still like to teach. "I've been a working woman most of our married lives, so I'd still like to do that," she says.

And it would all work out, assuming, of course, that it all works out.