Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. steps into his new job as a senator's senator — steeped in its culture and deeply respectful of its role in Washington's intricate balance of power. There couldn't be a more fitting backdrop than the Capitol dome when he is sworn in as vice president on Jan. 20.

The Senate has defined Biden's professional life since 1972, when at age 29 he bucked President Richard M. Nixon's re-election landslide and edged out a GOP incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, to capture the Delaware seat.

Tragedy struck weeks later when Biden's wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident and his two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were critically injured. Biden was sworn into the Senate at the boys' hospital bedside, but the young father spoke openly of suicide and considered resigning the seat he had just won.

No less than Nixon, in an awkward sympathy call after the accident, urged Biden to soldier on.

"Look ... at it as you must, in terms of your future. Because you have the great fortune of being young," the president told the grief-stricken Biden.

Biden did choose to stay in the Senate, forging a 35-year career now in its final days. He was sworn in for a seventh term Jan. 6 even though the next momentous chapter in his life was to begin in just two weeks. He led a fact-finding mission to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan the week of Jan. 5, insisting he was doing so in his role as Foreign Relations Committee chairman and not as a representative of the incoming administration.

On Tuesday, on the West Front of the Capitol, Justice John Paul Stevens will ask the 66-year-old Biden to raise his right hand and take the oath as the nation's 47th vice president.

Though Biden has spent his professional life here, he isn't a typical creature of Washington.

As a single father caring for his sons, Biden early on began a daily commute between Washington and Wilmington, Del., riding the Amtrak trains. The nightly trek home helped burnish the image of a middle-class everyman — Biden often can be found at Home Depot on a Saturday morning — one that has endured despite his lengthy tenure on Capitol Hill.

His second wife, Jill, is a professor at Delaware Technical and Community College and has spent little time in the city she will soon call home.

Despite his strong ties to his home state, Biden's public identity has been honed in the elite confines of the Senate. So has his sometimes windy speaking style — a trademark that has gotten him in hot water at times.