The bad news for Joe Biden is that he won't see his friends on the train commute from Washington to Delaware as often as he used to.

The good news is that he will stand by Barack Obama's side as Vice President while the new commander-in-chief embarks on the process of implementing the changes his campaign promised.

For the Scranton, PA native, it is a fairytale end to a long and distinguished political career.

Now 66, the Irish-Catholic brought up in a blue-collar town was first elected to the Senate when he was 29 years of age. With his boss only in the Senate for four years as a junior senator from Illinois, Biden's 35 years of Washington experience will help Obama immeasurably.

Biden, as many readers already know, is a proud Irish-American whose mother's family, the Finnegans, emigrated from Mayo during the Irish Famine. His father's family is of French Huguenot stock, and many of them lived in Ireland.

In an Irish America interview in April 1987, Biden explained the extent to which he felt his heritage: "My interest in Ireland was first of all a cultural one, not political. I always thought of myself as Irish. I never called myself anything else. I was Irish to the point that my dad used to get angry at times. He'd say, 'Your mother's Robinette, you're part French.' I always used to say, 'No, I'm Irish.'"

Biden, whose strong foreign affairs experience and ability to get the working class vote made him a solid candidate, will be a shrewd counsel for the President-Elect, who is inheriting a country involved in two wars and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.