Ending months of speculation, Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has chosen Sen. Joseph Biden of Deleware as his running mate, the Obama campaign announced on its website early Saturday morning.

Obama will formally introduce Biden as his choice for vice president at a rally in Springfield, Ill. Saturday, two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention.

“Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word!” the campaign announced Saturday morning in a text message to supporters after the news leaked out.

Biden, a six-term senator who also launched a campaign for the White House last year, is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. His extensive foreign policy credentials is widely viewed as an asset that would fill the void in Obama’s resume on issues related to national security and foreign policy. The campaign of presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain has consistently hammered away at Obama’s lack of experience in Washington as one reason he is unfit for the presidency.

But as Obama’s No. 2, Biden, who said last year on the campaign trail that he thought Obama was not yet ready to be President of the United States, can swiftly beat back that sort of criticism given the senator more than three decades in the senate, which may appeal to undecided voters and Independents. It certainly was a key factor in Obama’s decision to tap Biden as his running mate.

Biden, 65, dropped out of the 2008 presidential campaign in January after the Iowa caucuses. Biden also ran for the presidency in 1988 but dropped out over charges he plagiarized a speech from a British Labor Party leader. He has served as a U.S. senator since 1972.

Biden voted in favor of the resolution to use military force against Iraq. Biden’s son, Beau, a captain in the Army National Guard and Delaware’s attorney general, was just deployed to the region. Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq has been the center point of his campaign.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, (R-NE) said in 2002 that Biden “is one of the preeminent foreign policy thinkers in our country.”

In November 2002, Biden and Hagel traveled to Northern Iraq and returned to the U.S. “convinced of the need for Saddam’s removal,” according to the book Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper.

“Biden was squeamish about the feeble international support Bush had mustered and worried that the White House had little understanding of what it might face in Iraq,” Draper wrote. “Above all, he thought the administration’s case for immediate invasion was anemic.

“Chairman Biden picked up the phone and called his old friend [then Secretary of State] Colin Powell not long before Powell would be making the case for immediate regime change to the U.N. on February 5, 2003. ‘Look, just stick to what we know, okay, Colin? None of that crazy shit about Saddam buying uranium from Africa that Bush had mentioned in his January [2003] State of the Union Address.

“Joe,” Powell said, according to Draper’s book. “Someday when you’re retired and I’m retired, I’ll tell you about all the pressure I’ve been put under over here.”

Biden also refused to endorse charges made by the Bush administration’s former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that the White House failed to take seriously or act upon early warnings about an imminent attack on U.S. soil, according to the book The Greatest Story Ever Sold by New York Times columnist Frank Rich.

Rich said Biden and Sen. Joseph Lieberman chose to give President Bush “the benefit of the doubt” that the administration did everything it could to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

In a speech Biden gave on the Senate floor on Oct. 6, 2005, Biden lauded President Bush for providing the public with a “compelling description of the threat to America and to freedom from radical Islamic fundamentalism.”

President Bush “made, in my view, a powerful case for what is at stake for every American.”

“Simply put, the radical fundamentalists seek to kill our citizens in great numbers, to disrupt our economy, and to reshape the international order,” Biden said in response to an Oct. 6, 2005 speech President Bush gave to the National Endowment for Democracy. “They would take the world backwards, replacing freedom with fear and hope with hatred. If they were to acquire a nuclear weapon, the threat they would pose to America would be literally existential. The President said it well. The President is right that we cannot and will not retreat. We will defend ourselves and defeat the enemies of freedom and progress.“

Biden’s support for the invasion waned as the war dragged on. In 2006, he proposed partitioning Iraq into three separate regions- Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni- with a central government in Baghdad.

In a May 1, 2006 op-ed published in The New York Times Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the idea “is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group … room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”

Last year, Biden co-sponsored a non-binding resolution opposing President George W. Bush’s plan to deploy tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

“I believe that when a president goes way off course on something as important as Iraq, the single most effective way to get him to change course is to demonstrate that his policy has waning or no support – from both parties,” Biden said in January 2007, immediately following Bush’s announcement of the “surge.” “This resolution says what we, Democrats and Republicans, are against: deepening America’s military involvement in Iraq by escalating our troop presence. It also says what we are for: a strategy that can produce a political solution to stop the violence.”

Over the past 18 months, Biden has stepped up his criticism of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, particularly the White House’s approach toward Iran.

Last year, Biden threatened that he would move to impeach President Bush if he launched a military strike against Tehran without first consulting Congress.

“The President has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach” the President, Biden said last winter.

In a lengthy profile of Biden published in the March 21, 2005 edition of The New Yorker, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that Biden had a tendency to stretch the truth.

“On October 29th, Biden said, he was campaigning for [2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John] Kerry in Pennsylvania, the state in which he was born, when he heard, on the radio, that Osama bin Laden had issued a videotape in which he belittled Bush and promised to continue to “bleed” America,” Goldberg wrote. “Biden nearly panicked when he heard about the tape, he said, because he worried that Kerry’s reaction might seem tepid or petty. His advice to Kerry throughout the campaign-which, he complained, went unheeded much of the time-was to harden his message, to focus, as Bush was doing, on terrorism alone: to sound, in short, more like the President and less like a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

“I’m listening to the radio,” Biden said, according to Goldberg’s article. ” ‘Today’ “-here he adopted a radio announcer’s voice-” ‘the President of the U.S. said dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, and he said he’s sure Senator Kerry agrees with him. Senator Kerry, unable to resist a dig’-that’s what the announcer said, that was the phrase-’said today had we acted’-I’m paraphrasing-’had we acted properly in Tora Bora, we wouldn’t have this problem.’ “

Biden continued, “I’m on the phone, I e-mail, I say, ‘John, please, say three things: “How dare bin Laden speak of our President this way.” No. 2, “I know how to deal with preventing another 9/11.” No. 3, “Kill him.” ‘ Now, that’s harsh. Kerry needed to be harsh. And it was-Jesus Christ.” Here Biden threw up his hands. “He didn’t make any of it. Let’s get it straight. None of it. None of those three points were made.”

“This was not quite the case,” Goldberg wrote.” In Kerry’s first comment, made during an interview with a Milwaukee television station, he criticized Bush for missing an opportunity to kill bin Laden at Tora Bora, as he often had during the campaign. But, not long after that, Kerry spoke to the press, saying, “As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They’re barbarians, and I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture, or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes, period.”

“Biden,” according to Goldberg, “apparently, did not actually reach Kerry until that night, so Kerry made this statement without Biden’s help. In any case, Biden failed to recount the dénouement; leaving it out better served the point of his story, which concerned the troubles that faced the Kerry campaign and, by extension, the Democratic Party-a party that Biden hopes to see revived.”

Moreover, Goldberg wrote that Biden “seems not to know, when sentences leave his mouth, where they are going or what they are meant to convey. Sometimes, when he thinks that he may shock or amuse his listener, he begins by stating, “I’m going to get in trouble if I say this,” or, “This is a really outrageous thing to say, but . . . “

Indeed. While campaigning for the White House, Biden was roundly criticized when he described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The remarks, uttered during an interview in January 2007, was interpreted as patronizing and, as the Chicago Tribune explained, “appeared to carry some pretty negative assumptions about the majority of the race.”

During a stop in New Hampshire while on the campaign trail last year, Biden said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”