When Joe and Hunter Biden came to town

If your local representative has a longstanding personal relationship with the possible incoming president of the United States, that’s not a bad place to be.

Rosa DeLauro and Joe Biden go back a ways. She even has a few stories about his son Hunter, though if you’re looking for information about wayward laptops or missing servers you’ll have to go elsewhere.

Her “deep friendship” with Joe Biden, she said, dates to DeLauro’s job as chief of staff to former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, who then as now was one of Biden’s closest friends.

Dodd and Biden would bond over the fact that they consistently came in at the bottom of the annual list of richest senators. “They would be outside the Capitol and they would say, ‘ We could set up a hot dog stand right here, and we could sell hot dogs and we could sell chips,’ ” DeLauro recalled with a laugh.

Biden, knowing DeLauro’s deep roots in New Haven, once asked her for a favor.

“When his son, Hunter, was selecting a law school, he called me,” DeLauro, who is seeking reelection Tuesday, told the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board in a recent interview. “He said, ‘Rosa, I want you to call my son and persuade him to go to Yale Law School and not to California. I want him to be close.’

“I did have a call with Hunter,” she said, “and the long and the short of it is, he selected Yale.”

Then there was another favor, but again, if you’re looking for information that’s going to shake up the election, prepare to be disappointed.

“They lived on (New Haven’s) Court Street, and you know who represented that community on the Board of Aldermen — my mom, and she got involved with looking to see if there was a place for an apartment,” DeLauro said.

“My mother delivered pizza to Joe and his brother and Hunter and his family. My mom shows up one Friday night and who answers the door but Joe Biden, in Bermuda shorts and a cap and he’s got a paint roller in his hand and no shirt, and she says, ‘I’m looking for Senator Biden,’ and he says, ‘It’s me!’”

That’s the future vice president acting very much like a regular dad helping out his son.

It hasn’t all been easy since then, and there’s no question that Hunter Biden has turned out to be a headache for his father’s campaign. He very likely was brought into various jobs over the years solely on the strength of his name and connections. But there’s been no indication Joe Biden had much to do with it or benefited in any way. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” that newspaper reported recently about the latest Hunter story to make the rounds.

That’s partly why the Hunter story lines have been so hard to follow. No one can articulate precisely what Joe Biden was supposed to get out of the various scandals engulfing his son.

More telling is what DeLauro saw that day in New Haven, and what she said she’s looking forward to from a potential Biden administration. “I believe he is someone who understands what people’s lives are about,” she said, naming specifically an expansion of the child tax credit, a policy she has been pushing since 2003.

“It is in his tax policy,” she said. “I called the campaign and I said, ‘I read it, it’s there, and I trust you, but I want to verify that that’s going to happen.’ They told me that’s where he’s going.”

Other longtime DeLauro policies that could see life in a Biden presidency include equal pay for women, paid sick days and paid family and medical leave.

“I’m not Pollyanna,” she said. “It’s not going to be everything you ever wanted.

“But these issues that can play such a role in people’s lives in helping them toward economic security and health security,” she said, “that we have a chance after all these years, after we have been hanging on by our fingernails, that we will be able to move in that direction — I can’t tell you how exciting that is.”