-Well, here's one --
"Saving the environment means risking your neck."
This is 1972.
Nobody was talking about the environment
in 1972, let me tell you.
"Joe's sister is his campaign manager.
His brother is his fundraising director."
-This is the campaign.
-And this is how Joe Biden became a US Senator at age 29.
-We didn't have any money.
And limited resources force you to think outside the box.
-Valerie Biden Owens is Joe Biden's sister.
Ted Kaufman was his long-time Chief of Staff in the Senate.
It helped that Delaware is small.
-You can go stem to stern in two hours,
and the width of it is 35 minutes.
-That first campaign enlisted moms
in station wagons and kids on the football team.
-We had to money to mail them.
They delivered the newspaper.
And they couldn't put them in the mailbox
because it was against the law,
so they went up to the doors and were chased by dogs,
and except at the end of six weeks,
people were waiting at the door, like, "Where is it?"
-He's like a -- Can't explain it,
but it's like a bubbly person that just is constantly up.
And people liked him immediately once he gave them that smile.
-We literally have a chance to shape the future,
to put our stamp on the face and character of America,
to bend history just a little bit.
-James Baker is the former mayor of Wilmington,
the state's largest city.
He was running for city council in 1972
when Biden asked to campaign with him in downtown Wilmington.
-Well, he was a shot. He just took off.
He was meeting people, shaking hands, talking to people.
He didn't need me at all.
-Delaware is the first state. J.
Caleb Boggs, who is the incumbent Republican,
being challenged by Joseph Biden.
Biden is a Democrat who is 29 years of age,
but will turn 30 on the 20th of November and thus will be
Constitutionally eligible to serve should he win.
-Joe Biden beat the well- established Republican
incumbent by 3,100 votes.
-I can remember when they announced that he won.
This is the honest-to-God truth.
I will never believe anything is impossible again.
-That's what it is. -Loads of people just have --
I mean, this could never, ever happen, and it did.
-At age 30, Joe Biden took office,
one of the youngest Senators in US history.
-He was like the token young person.
So a lot of things happened to him.
He was asked to speak around the country.
He was asked by the Democratic party.
He was asked to come in and work campaigns.
-All of this raised Biden's profile.
In the Senate, he stayed.
And with that came seniority.
Biden became chairman of powerful committees,
judiciary, foreign relations.
-In all my years in the Senate, Secretary Rice,
I don't think we've faced a more pivotal moment
than the one we face today.
Failure in Iraq will not be confined to Iraq.
-He was at the center of political moments --
the Robert Bork nomination, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.
How Biden handled that hearing with his allegations
of sexual harassment still follows him today.
-The Clarence Thomas hearings, you know,
put him in a very difficult position
because he trusted the institution.
He didn't want to slight his Republican colleagues.
And in hindsight, that's been problematic for him.
Those instincts, in today's light,
are cast a little bit differently than they were then.
-Matt Viser is a national political reporter for
"The Washington Post"
and is covering the Biden campaign.
-He came up at a time where it was important to work with,
as they say in the Senate, "my friend," you know?
He had friends in the Senate.
And he was dedicated to working with them,
even people like Mitch McConnell,
who now are sort of bogeymen of the Democratic party
and have kind of changed the rules.
-Biden spent 36 years in the Senate,
commuting back and forth to Wilmington on Amtrak
where the station now carries his name.
Biden's legislative record in the Senate spans 42 bills,
bills where he was the primary sponsor that later became law.
Among the most significant,
the 1994 crime bill that took on a range of issues,
from violence against women to drugs
and a ban on assault weapons.
It was a time of high crime rates,
as crack cocaine swept into America's big cities.
-With the drugs, you just never know, do you?
I mean, you just know no what -- The guy you're about to arrest,
the person you're about to pick up,
you have no idea if that person's spaced out
and long gone.
To suggest that A, there's less money for cops,
B, there's less money for prisons and so on.
This bill will save people's lives.
This is necessary.
-Who are the victims of crime?
It's the people at the lower levels of our society.
It's the people of color.
Those are the people that are the victims
of most of the crime,
and that was part of the crime bill.
-We were able to use the federal law to bring in 20 new officers,
which we wouldn't have been able to do without that bill.
So, in effect, it did us a lot of good.
-But tough sentences for drug possession
led to a massive rise in the prison population,
with the African-American community feeling it the most.
-The approach that we've been taking has been punitive,
and it has been really about making sure
that we're able to punish.
It's been mixed in with intentional racism.
-Shyanne Miller is president
of a grassroots coalition in Delaware
looking to reform the criminal justice system.
-We've been criminalizing even what we now know are diseases,
public health crises, like addiction,
and so we know that not only does this approach not work,
but we still keep doing it.
And it's driving me nuts.
And it's driving everyone in my community nuts,
and I hope that we can fix it.
I really do.
-In 2008, Barack Obama ran as a candidate of change,
but when he needed a running mate,
he turned to the old guard.
Senator Biden became Vice President Biden.
-To Joe Biden.
[cheers and applause]
The scrappy kid from Scranton
who became Delaware's favorite son.
You were the first decision I made as a nominee,
and it was the best.
[cheers and applause]
-At 76, Joe Biden is making his third run for the presidency.
If he wins, the fresh-faced upstart who became a Senator
would be the oldest person ever sworn into office.
-We love Joe! -As his party moves to the left,
Biden is facing questions about his record in the Senate.
Biden says his crime bill wasn't responsible
for mass incarceration,
but he also admits he made mistakes here
and has tried fixing them.
-In 2010, Barack and I finally reduced the disparity
in sentencing, which we have been fighting
to eliminate in crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.
It was a big mistake when it was made.
We were told by the experts that crack, you never go back.
It was somehow fundamentally diff--
It's not different, but it's trapped an entire generation.
-It all has Democrats wondering if they should look to the past
and Joe Biden or leave him behind.
-He tends to argue for sort of a return to normalcy,
a return to the period before President Trump.
And the question confronting the Democratic party right now
is whether they want that, you know,
whether they want to return to something before Trump
or whether our politics have fundamentally shifted.
And Joe Biden argues that they haven't,
that the country fundamentally wants compromise.
They want Democrats and Republicans
to respect one another and deal
with one another and compromise with one another.
-The Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence,
they use the word "we," "We the people."
-This race, perhaps his final race,
is not really all that different from the first one,
some 47 years ago.
-None of the campaigns were ever about Joe
and about his seeking power.
The campaigns were always about the other guy, the voter,
the person who was looking at us.
-You got to make me a promise.
When you're President of the United States,
you'll remember who I was, okay?
[laughter] All right, let me answer the question.
-The reasons he's running for president today
is the fact that he would not feel right about himself
with the soul of America at stake,
with the issues that are at stake, if he didn't run.
-And may God protect our troops. [cheers and applause]
-We want Joe!
We want Joe! We want Joe!