To agree with Mike, Biden isn't just one of the only non-millionaires in the Senate. He's the poorest senator, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. He has a very modest lifestyle; doesn't own a home in DC (much less one in La Jolla, like McCain does); his wife is a schoolteacher; etc. He's lived like a public servant, emphasis on the "servant."
Then again, the plagiarism episode is more cringe-worthy than I'd remembered, as this exhaustive GQ profile points out. It wasn't any old piece of rhetoric he lifted from Neil Kinnock. It was biographical material ("my ancestors, who worked in the coal mines") ... which, of course, only applied to Neil Kinnock, not to the miner-relative-free Joe Biden.
--Eve Fairbanks