It should have been the best of times, but it was the worst of times for Joseph Biden. For months it had been a truth universally acknowledged: that the Senator in want of the presidency could revive his flagging candidacy as he presided over the Robert Bork confirmation hearings. But, oh, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Before Bork even took the witness stand, Biden learned the hard way that 1988 presidential politics has become a school for scandal. Now many believe that Biden's beleaguered candidacy has almost certainly shuffled off its mortal coil. But the defiant candidate still insists that the whole flap is "much ado about nothing."
One thing is for sure: Joe Biden has surmounted his name-recognition problem. In fact, he received more exposure last week than he may be able to bear. Serious students of public affairs probably noticed that he performed competently, but far from memorably, at the Bork hearings. But what most voters are more likely to remember was the endless TV sequences of Biden's words on the campaign trail juxtaposed with almost identical oratory coming from the mouth of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. English teachers in New Hampshire high schools were soon using Biden as the bad example in lessons on the evils of plagiarism.
What might be called the Glib Crib Crisis began when the New York Times revealed that Biden had been guilty of rhetorical shoplifting. Biden's passionate and seemingly personal closing statement in a Democratic debate in Iowa in late August had been swiped without attribution and almost word for word from a Kinnock TV commercial designed to evoke memories of the British class struggle. Where Kinnock's coal-mining ancestors worked "eight hours underground," Biden's somewhat mythical forebears "would come up after twelve hours." Biden in the past had given credit to Kinnock, but in Iowa he introduced the fiery rhetoric by deceptively claiming, "I started thinking as I was coming over here . . ." To make matters worse, Biden repeated the offense in a tape he made three days later for the National Education Association.
It was clearly folly for Biden to expropriate Kinnock's family tree as he conjured up coal-mining ancestors "who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse." But hitherto, politics has been far more tolerant of borrowings from Bartlett's than of monkey business in Bimini. In fact, some of the most famous lines of modern oratory have questionable paternity. Winston Churchill's "blood, toil, tears and sweat" was inspired by John Donne; John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" echoed Oliver Wendell Holmes; and Ronald Reagan's 1980 debate cry, "I am paying for this microphone," was apparently lifted from a 1948 movie, State of the Union.
Why, then, has Biden become a modern-day Jean Valjean, condemned to suffer permanently for the political equivalent of stealing a loaf of bread? Biden is more than a hapless victim, since his Gatling-gun rhetoric certainly compounded the problem. Still, the Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.
1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. "The basic rap against Biden," explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, "is that he's a candidate of style, not substance."