Joe Biden: Lots of walking

When Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden was in Charlotte Sunday, he ridiculed Republican John McCain's statement that the economy had made progress under President Bush.

"I could walk from here to Greensboro,” he told a crowd at a Phillip O. Berry Academy. “I wouldn't run into one person who thought we'd made economic progress unless I ran into John McCain.”

A few days earlier, he was in New Hampshire.

"I can walk from here to Manchester, and I doubt I'll find anyone who said the fundamentals are strong and the economy's roaring, unless I run into John McCain."

This week he was in Michigan.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain,” he said.

If he ever DID run into McCain, they wouldn't necessarily talk about their political differences. Biden always prefaces his criticisms with testimony about their long personal friendship. In Charlotte, he talked about a call he made eight years ago after McCain was roughed up in the S.C. GOP primary.

"Where do you want me John?" he recalled asking. "I'll show up where ever you want to testify for your integrity and character."

Joe, Strom and Jesse

Republicans were quick to attack Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate today, just as Biden jumped into his role of partisan attack dog during a speech in Springfield, Illinois.

But the Delaware senator, after three decades in the Senate, learned to get along with even those Republican colleagues he disagreed with so vehemently, including two from the Carolinas.

In 2003, Biden delivered a eulogy at the Columbia funeral of longtime GOP Sen. and one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond.

"I disagreed deeply with Strom on the issue of civil rights and on many other issues, but I watched him change. We became good friends; I'm not sure exactly how or why it happened. I grew to know him. I learned from him, and I watched him change, oh so subtly.

"Like all of us, he started off as a product of his time. But he understood people; he cared for them. He knew how to read people, how to move them, how to get things done."

Last October, I covered an appearance by Biden in Rock Hill. It was during the senator's own short-lived presidential campaign. When the crowd was gone, he came up to me, the only N.C. reporter there.

"Tell me one thing," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "How's Jesse?"

Like Thurmond, Jesse Helms was Biden's polar opposite in so many ways. But that didn't stop the two men, colleagues on the foreign relations committee, from sharing a mutual respect.

Last month, Biden was one of a handful of prominent Democrats at Helms' funeral in Raleigh.