CHICAGO, Aug 23: Barack Obama on Saturday named veteran Senate colleague Joseph Biden as his vice presidential running mate, adding foreign policy heft – but also a loose tongue – to his ticket in the battle against Republican John McCain.

After hours of media leaks, the 47-year-old Democratic White House hopeful confirmed that he was picking the 65-year-old Delaware senator in an early-hours email and text message sent out to millions of signed-up supporters.

“I’ve chosen Joe Biden to be my running mate,” Obama said in the email.

“I’m excited about hitting the campaign trail with Joe, but the two of us can’t do this alone. We need your help to keep building this movement for change.”

Biden was likely to join Obama on a tour of four states to the west before ending up in Denver for the coming week’s Democratic convention. He will speak on Wednesday, followed by Obama on Thursday. The official website already read “Obama-Biden” and it invited supporters to send a welcome note to Biden, an experienced Washington insider first elected to Congress at the age of 29.

The chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee has twice run for the presidency himself, including a shot at the Democratic nomination when he had some unflattering things to say about Obama’s inexperience.—AFP

Masood Haider adds from New York: Sen. Biden is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s policy of extending support to military regime in Pakistan under former president Pervez Musharraf. Recently, he had cautioned the Bush administration against taking any steps that could be interpreted as propping up the former army chief.

Biden is spearheading a piece of legislation for tripling Pakistan’s economic assistance to $15 billion payable in 10 years. He is known as one of the foremost supporters of democratic forces in Pakistan.

“The political future of (former) president Musharraf is a matter to be decided by the Pakistani people, through normal constitutional channels. Washington should not do anything that appears as thwarting their will,” Biden has said.

In recent years, Biden has twice travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and to Iraq eight times.

Sen Biden has endured tragedy and neared death: five weeks after he won his Senate seat in 1972, his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident. And in 1988, he suffered a brain aneurysm and nearly died.

A political expert noted on NBC television that Sen. Biden’s long-windedness occasionally leads him to make remarks that prove to be embarrassing. In 2007, he seemed to be talking down to Obama by calling him “clean” and “articulate.”

In 2006, he said: “In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

During his bid for the nomination last year, Biden criticised Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. “Both Hillary and Barack didn’t get it right,” Biden said, when they had their “little spat” on whether a president could order a unilateral attack on terrorists in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

And he criticised Obama and former Sen. John Edwards for “playing the populism card, the idea that rich are bad, poor are good, the nobility of America lies in the poor. I think that’s a losing general election argument; I think it’s a losing argument, period.” He argued: “The rich are as patriotic as the poor, if you ask of them.”