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2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people's ideas.
3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because "he didn't know what he was saying. He was on autopilot."
4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting.
5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.
6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself "stupid" and his actions "a mistake." Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was "ludicrous" to attribute every political idea.
Was the peculiar timing of the barrage of Biden brickbats accidental? The Des Moines Register reported that an unidentified campaign had circulated an "attack video" linking Kinnock's and Biden's rhetoric. A reporter for a Florida legal newspaper, the Miami Review, was also tipped off last week about the law school plagiarism incident and alerted a sister publication, Washington's Legal Times. In trying to confirm the information, reporters for the paper talked to a variety of Washington political insiders, including an adviser to the Richard Gephardt campaign.
Whatever the justice of the case, Biden's campaign does appear seriously wounded by the latest outbreak of the New Politics of Rectitude. Biden vowed that his campaign will continue, but barring some cleansing act of valor, he may be doomed to limp along until the chance comes to withdraw honorably from the fray. In the end, Biden may be remembered as the candidate who truly offered the voters an echo and not a choice.