Biden's Belly Flop
Newsweek
September 28, 1987, UNITED STATES EDITION
Copyright 1987 Newsweek

Section: NATIONAL AFFAIRS; Pg. 23
Length: 1441 words
Byline: MICKEY KAUS with ELEANOR CLIFT and HOWARD FINEMAN in Washington and JOHN MCCORMICK
in Chicago
Highlight: Charges of plagiarism unhinge his campaign

Body
The snippet of C-SPAN videotape is especially prized by Joe Biden's rivals. It shows Senator Biden at a coffee
klatsch in Claremont, N.H. A man named Frank asks him politely what law school he attended and how well he did.
Biden's teeth flash his Joe Isuzu smile. "I think I have a much higher IQ than you do," he shoots back, jabbing a
finger at his questioner, "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship." Biden goes on. He did badly his first
year but "ended up in the top half" of his class. "I won the international moot-court competition . . . I was the
outstanding student in the political-science department [at college] . . . I graduated with three degrees from college
. . . And I'd be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you'd like, Frank."
On the tape Biden appears hyper, glib, intellectually insecure. But there is another problem: Biden did not go to
Syracuse Law School on a "full academic scholarship." He went on a half scholarship based on financial need. He
didn't finish in the "top half" of his class. He was 76th out of 85. If he won an international moot-court competition,
he has inexplicably neglected to list it on his resume. He did not win the award given to the outstanding politicalscience student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware. Finally, he didn't graduate from Delaware
with "three degrees," but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Last week was supposed to be good for the Biden presidential campaign, the week his chairmanship of the Bork
hearings (page 27) would make him a star. Instead, his campaign came unhinged amid charges of plagiarism. The
C-SPAN snippet isn't a bad place to begin trying to understand why it happened. The clip, word of which has
gleefully circulated within Washington political circles, reflects a view of Biden's character widely shared in the
community. Reporters and political consultants long ago concluded that Biden's chief character flaw was his
tendency to wing it. He seems to lack a crucial synapse between brain and tongue, the one that makes the do-Ireally-want-to-say-this decision.
Biden's synapse certainly didn't fire last Aug. 23, as he sped in a Chevy van down Locust Street in Des Moines,
heading for a debate at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. He and an aide, David Wilhelm, were rehearsing his spiel. His
opening sounded fine. But he needed a "close." The two perorations supplied by his Washington staff, Wilhelm
recalls, were "pabulum." Wilhelm had a bright idea. Nine days earlier he had watched Biden deliver a stirring
soliloquy borrowed, with lengthy attribution, from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Why not wow the statefair crowd with the same pitch? Biden agreed. But for some reason, instead of crediting Kinnock during the debate,
Biden implied the passage was his own. "I was thinking on the way over here. . . ," he began.
Gore's gaffe: Speechwriters steal all the time, but Biden's bulk borrowing violated even the vague norms of the
profession. Still, it was hardly a capital offense. Last spring Sen. Albert Gore, another Democratic candidate,
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blatantly stole a trademark anecdote of Congressman Morris Udall's, got caught and was punished with only a few
back-page paragraphs. But nobody suspected Gore of dangerous glibness. They did Biden. As a veteran political
reporter David Broder has noted, Edmund Muskie didn't commit a capital offense either when he broke down while
rebutting newspaper charges against him and his wife in the 1972 New Hampshire primary. It was because
reporters were already worried about Muskie's temperament that they played up the incident into a major gaffe from
which his campaign never recovered.
Like the "temperamental" Muskie and the "womanizing" Gary Hart, Biden had made the mistake, almost always
fatal, of handing reporters an incident they could interpret in light of their pre-existing doubts. The New York Times,
after obtaining an "attack video" showing Biden and Kinnock back to back, ran the story on page one. (The Des
Moines Register, by contrast, ran it on page two the same day.)
Life swap: On the evening news the video was devastating. It was especially creepy given the personal nature of
the soliloquy -- "Why is it that [Biden here substituted his name for Kinnock's] is the first in his family ever to go to a
university? Why is it that my wife . . . is the first in her family to ever go to college?" Biden "wasn't borrowing
Kinnock's literature," notes Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter. "He was borrowing Kinnock's life."
Midweek, in another page-one story, the Times pointed out that Biden had also used, without credit, two famous
passages from Robert F. Kennedy speeches. The "pattern" seemed complete with the revelation that, as a firstyear law student, Biden had lifted, word for word, five pages from a law review. (He was given an F, changed to a
B when he repeated the course.) In the ritual of campaign collapse, it was time for the defiant, confessional press
conference.
Biden did better than Hart did at this stage, but he's not quite ready for "Nightline." His failure to credit Kinnock at
the debate was inadvertent, he said, "the only time" he didn't do so. But another tape turned up, in which he also
didn't mention Kinnock while claiming he'd just had the same inspired train of thought. He said he hadn't
recognized one Kennedy passage (in a speech written for him by his adviser, Pat Caddell). He admitted falsely
implying that a British politician, Denis Healey, had given him the Kinnock speech, an error he attributed to "extraexuberance."
As for the law-school plagiarism, it was "almost 23 years ago." Biden's defenders insisted the statute of limitations
had passed (as it has for Sen. Edward Kennedy, another practitioner of stressless scholarship, who had a friend
take a Spanish exam for him at Harvard). But there was still that disquieting pattern. Back then, defending himself
to the faculty in a desperate letter, Biden wrote, "the fact that the opinion of the various cases cited was not original,
I thought was irrelevant."
Biden also failed to puncture another popular press preconception: that he is merely a lump of clay in the hands of
Svengali-like consultants, especially Caddell, who saw Biden as the man to mobilize "baby boomers." In the
strangest moment of his news conference, Biden persisted in taking credit for saying that few men "have the
greatness to bend history," even complaining that rivals were stealing the line. The phrase is Robert Kennedy's. Its
well-known provenance had been discussed in the previous day's Times story on Biden himself. Here Biden really
did seem less malevolent than manipulated, a naif whose identity consists of the lines he's fed.
Perhaps the demise of the Biden campaign, now a distinct possibility, will end the two-decade attempt by
Democratic strategists to take promising politicians, with their own defects and virtues, and mold them into ersatz
Kennedys. Biden seemed almost relieved to confess that despite Caddell's frequent speechwriters' hints, he was
not a '60s generational model who had marched in the streets: "You're looking at a middle-class guy . . . I'm not big
on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts."
Key flaw: Whatever happens, Biden is the second Democratic candidate this year to have his key character flaw
located, bombarded and exploded with frightening efficiency be the press. Nominations are all ready being
accepted for the next "character" case, as the focus has shifted to figuring out who did Biden in by leaking the
damaging videos. A Biden official in Iowa, Eric Woolson, said in an interview he'd been advised in August by Barry
Piatt, a friend in the Gephardt camp, not to go with Biden because "'Biden's going to drop out of the race in mid-

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Biden's Belly Flop
September'." (Piatt denies saying this.) Gephardt's special flaw, the new theory went, might be ruthlessness.
Would he torpedo Biden even as Biden was waging the Democrats' fight against Bork?
The Gephardt campaign became so worried about a backlash that it obtained an unusual statement from New York
Times Washington bureau chief Craig Whitney that "the Gephardt camp did not plant that story on us." Gephardt
aides called reporters to deny blind-siding Biden and to point fingers at Sen. Paul Simon or Gov. Michael Dukakis.
They also suggested the White House might have been behind everything. Since the week ended with the
Democrats busy knifing each other -- and the focus shifted from the Bork hearings -- Republicans could hardly have
planned it better, even if they didn't plan it at all.

Graphic

Picture 1, Once again a question of character badly damages a candidate: Biden at the hearings, WALLY
McNAMEE -- NEWSWEEK; Picture 2, Law school: Yearbook picture and transcript with failing grade and the
eventual passing grade, COURTESY SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY; Picture 3, Law school: Yearbook picture and
transcript with failing grade and the eventual passing grade; Picture 4, An eloquent source: Kinnock on the stump,
NEWSPIX -- SIPA; Picture 5, Statute of limitations? Biden with Kennedy -- practitioners of stressless scholarship,
WALLY McNAMEE -- NEWSWEEK

Classification
Language: ENGLISH

Subject: GRADUATE & PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS (90%); SCHOLARSHIPS & GRANTS (90%); US
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2020 (90%); US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2016 (90%); LAW SCHOOLS
(90%); POLITICAL SCIENCE (89%); LAWYERS (89%); NEGATIVE PERSONAL NEWS (89%); SOCIAL SCIENCE
EDUCATION (89%); CERTIFICATES, DEGREES & DIPLOMAS (78%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (78%);
STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (78%); US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2008 (78%); US PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES 2012 (78%); PLAGIARISM (78%); HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE (78%); US PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTIONS (78%); INTELLIGENCE & COGNITION (76%)

Company: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (82%); SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (82%); UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
(54%); UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE (54%)

Organization: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (82%); SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (82%); UNIVERSITY OF
DELAWARE (54%); UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE (54%)

Industry: LAW SCHOOLS (90%); GRADUATE & PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS (90%); LAWYERS (89%)

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Person: JOE BIDEN (93%)

Geographic: DES MOINES, IA, USA (79%); SYRACUSE, NY, USA (58%); DELAWARE, USA (91%); IOWA, USA
(79%); NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA (79%); UNITED STATES (92%)

End of Document

Katie Sanders