Kerry Pays Tribute to Biden's Lifetime of Public Service

[The Straight Story]

Kerry Pays Tribute to Biden's Lifetime of Public Service



WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator John Kerry (D – Mass.) today honored Senator Joe Biden’s lifetime commitment to public service hours before Biden resigned his Senate seat in preparation to be sworn in as the next Vice President of the United States.

Senator Biden’s resignation marks Kerry’s official transition to Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a post most recently held by Biden.

Below is the full text of Kerry’s speech as prepared:

It’s hard to imagine the Senate without Joe Biden. Not just because he came here as a kid, not just because he chaired some of the institution’s most important committees, but because of this moment. This is the kind of Senate legislative moment that Joe Biden loves to be in the middle of.

Obviously, we take special pride in knowing that one of our own is about to become Vice President. And while this makes him President of the Senate, for once I wish Dick Cheney was right, and Joe was still a part of the legislative branch. But, make no mistake: the Senate’s loss is President Obama’s and the country’s gain. Joe will bring terrific strategic thinking and legislative experience to the challenges we face.

This is a special moment in so many ways – and, it is an emotional one. I’ve known Joe since we were both kids in terms of this journey -- since we first ran for office in 1972. We learned about each other then, reading the press clips and hearing stories from our mutual friends and joint campaign workers. The conventional wisdom that year held that Joe couldn’t win his race against an incumbent, Cale Boggs, who’d been winning elections in Delaware for 26 years. I was favored to win mine. It didn’t turn out that way.

To this day, I like to kid our long time mutual friend John Martilla, who was deeply involved on both our races that year, that if he’d spent more time in Lowell and less time in Wilmington, things might have turned out differently. But for Joe and me, both in politics and life, things turned out pretty well, and I’ve loved sharing this journey with him.

In a lot of ways Joe Biden is an old fashioned kind of guy – he lives life and politics by the old rules – unfailingly loyal, your word is your bond, tell the truth, act on principle not ideology, keep faith with family and home, never forget where your roots are or who you are, be consistent and be honest. Joe Biden is a patriarch to the core, in the best, time honored understanding of that word. He never smiles more broadly or laughs more deeply or talks more personally than when the subject is family. Frankly, to know Joe Biden is to know all the Bidens. Dozens of our colleagues—and hundreds over the years—know that if you called Joe Biden with a late-night question, the odds were pretty high you would have caught him on that train, riding Amtrak home to be there with Jill, Beau, Hunter, Ashley, and the grandchildren. And there’s something pretty great about a United States Senator who makes sure to stop by his mom’s house for ice cream or a kiss goodnight on his way home—and that is exactly what Joe would do with his 92-year-old spitfire mother, Jean Finnegan Biden.

http://kerry.senate.gov/cfm/record.cfm?id=306762