Neither mustered more than 1 percent in the intensely competitive contest won by freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
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Biden was the most promising of the second-tier candidates, in large part because of his [1] extensive national security experience, his chairmanship of the [2] Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his [3] realist view of the Iraq war.
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It was his second run for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first being in 1988.