Biden plays up working-class roots 

Dashing across battleground states in the final race to the polls on Tuesday, Joe Biden never fails to bring up his working-class, Roman Catholic roots and the hard times his family faced.

Biden, who grew up in a tough part of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is one of the Democratic ticket's best hopes for reaching blue-collar workers in traditionally Republican areas where President George W. Bush clinched the last election.

Over the past few days, his campaign bus crisscrossed Ohio and Indiana, a state that last voted for a Democrat in 1964, and then flew to traditionally conservative northern Florida.

Underlining the tightness of the race, Biden is being sent back to Ohio on Monday and is also campaigning in Missouri and Pennsylvania, asking undecided voters to deliver the presidency to Barack Obama.

"A lot of parents are sweating it out ...people are asking themselves more and more, am I going to have a job next month," Biden said at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, at a late night rally on Sunday.

"Imagine what it's like being a single mother or father making minimum wage," Biden said. When he was a single parent after his first wife and baby girl died in 1972, he noted, at least he had a senator's salary to care for his two sons.

At each rally, Biden recalls in hushed tones how his family fell on hard times and, when he was 10, his father walked into his bedroom to tell him they had to give up their house and move to Delaware to find work.

He then brings the story back to the present, when home foreclosures are at record levels and parents must break the same news to their children.

On the rope lines, supporters tell of losing jobs, fears over health care and how they will put food on the table.

"We need to get out of this slump that we are in," said Asen Kristoff of Dayton, Ohio. "People are really hurting here, especially blue-collar workers," he added, pointing out that General Motors had announced plant closures in the area.

"My parents are without health insurance. My dad is a small business owner and he can't afford it," said Sahrish Chaudhary of the University of Delaware.

Joe O'Biden

Obama draws tens of thousands of supporters, but Biden's rallies have several thousand people at most and are often in school gyms or university fields.

Biden, 65, chides supporters when they boo his opponents, but then pokes fun at Republican candidate John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin for calling themselves "mavericks."

"You can't call yourself a maverick when all you have been the last eight years is a sidekick to President George W. Bush," is one of his favorite applause lines.

McCain himself has called Biden "the gift that keeps on giving" for his occasional gaffes.

Biden's statement that US enemies would "test" a President Obama within six months of taking office has underlined McCain's argument that the Democrat is not ready to be commander-in-chief, McCain told a rally in Tampa on Monday.

Biden plays up his Irish Catholic roots and sprinkles speeches with "God love you" and "God bless you." He relishes showing Ohio crowds a T-shirt with the slogan: "O'bama, O'Biden, O'hio, O'8."

"I'm Joe O'Biden," he crows to the crowd.

Catholics have been swing voters for decades and if elected, Biden would be the first Catholic vice president. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president.

Biden also stirs the crowd with the historic nature of the election, which could result in Obama being the first black president in the United Sates.

"I see him (Obama) as a once-in-a-lifetime transformational leader when we need it most," Joe Nicosia of Kettering said.