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The Write Stuff?Why Biden's plagiarism
shouldn't be forgotten.
Updated Monday, Aug. 25, 2008, at 1:35 PM ET
of someone else's words and ideas to be a very serious offense, but the
public doesn't seem to mind much, at least when it comes to politics.
The incidents of plagiarism and fabrication that forced Joe Biden to
quit the 1988 presidential race have drawn little comment since his
selection as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate—just as
revelations of plagiarism by Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin
scarcely hurt their book sales. In 1987, before Biden quit the race, he
called the incidents "a tempest in a teapot." Although most reporters
disagreed then, at least enough to pursue the story, they seem
now—perhaps jaded by two decades of scandal-mongering—to have come around to Biden's view.
recalling in detail, because his transgressions far exceeded Obama's
own relatively innocent lifting of rhetorical set pieces from his
friend Deval Patrick, which occasioned a brief flap last February.
Biden's misdeeds encompassed numerous self-aggrandizing thefts,
misstatements, and exaggerations that seemed to point to a serious
character defect. In some ways, the 1988 campaign—in which scandal
forced not just Biden but also Gary Hart from the race—marked a
watershed in the absurd gotcha politics that have since marred our
politics and punditry. But unlike Hart's plight, Biden's can't be
blamed on an overly intrusive or hectoring press corps. The press was
right to dig into this one.
after Hart dropped out in May 1987 over the exposure of his affair with
Donna Rice, none of the remaining "seven dwarves" in the Democratic
field pulled away from the pack. Biden's youth and vitality—as well as
his tutelage by Patrick Caddell, the pollster-consultant considered a
veritable magician by insiders—made him a decent bet to reach the front
of the pack. Over the summer, the rival campaigns of Michael Dukakis
and Dick Gephardt became concerned as Biden ticked upward in the polls.
a videotape of the British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, who had run
unsuccessfully against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The tape
showed Kinnock delivering a powerful speech about his rise from humble
roots. Taken by the performance, Biden adapted it for his own stump
speech. Biden, after all, was the son of a car salesman, a
working-class kid made good. Kinnock's material fit with the story he
was trying to sell.
him. But at some point he failed to offer the attribution. Biden
maintained that he lapsed only once—at a debate at the Iowa State Fair,
on Aug. 23, when cameras recorded it—but Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported two incidents of nonattribution, and no one kept track exactly of every time Biden used the Kinnock bit. (Click *here for examples of Biden's lifting.) What
is certain is that Biden didn't simply borrow the sort of boilerplate
that counts as common currency in political discourse—phrases like
"fighting for working families." What he borrowed was Kinnock's life.
his sequences of ideas—a degree of plagiarism that would qualify any
student for failure, if not expulsion from school. But the even greater
sin was to borrow biographical facts from Kinnock that, although true
about Kinnock, didn't apply to Biden. Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn't the
first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted;
nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used
Kinnock's words. Once exposed, Biden's campaign team managed to come up
with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly
fit the candidate's description of one who "would come up [from the
mines] after 12 hours and play football." At any rate, Biden had
delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly
implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his
own life.
to Britain's politics that they recognized Kinnock's words. But Michael
Dukakis' adviser John Sasso had seen the Kinnock tape. Without his
boss's knowledge or consent, he prepared a video juxtaposing the two
men's speeches and got it into the hands of Dowd at the Times, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register,
and NBC News. When the story broke on Sept. 12, Biden was gearing up to
chair the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Robert Bork, Ronald
Reagan's far-right nominee. Biden angrily denied having done anything
wrong and urged the press to chase after the political rival who had
sent out what came to be called the "attack video."
plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the
next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of
speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took
four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another.
(In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his
speech without Biden's knowledge; in another account, the failure to
credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went
into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly
affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another
uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.
day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because
he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper
that he submitted. He admitted as well that he had falsely stated that
British Labor official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape.
(Healey had denied the claim.) And Biden conceded that he had
exaggerated in another matter by stating in a speech some years earlier
that he had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie
theaters, and was thus actively involved in the civil rights movement.
He protested, his press secretary clarified, "to desegregate one
restaurant and one movie theater." The latter two of these fibs were
small potatoes by any reckoning, but in the context of other acts of
dishonesty, they helped to form a bigger picture.
"I'm in the race to stay, I'm in the race to win, and here I come," he
declared. That meant, of course, that his days were numbered. Newsweek soon reported on a C-SPAN videotape from the previous April that showed
Biden berating a heckler at a campaign stop. While lashing out at the
audience member, Biden defended his academic credentials by inflating
them, in a fashion that was notably unbecoming and petty for a
presidential candidate.
do, I suspect," Biden sniped at the voter. "I went to law school on a
full academic scholarship." That claim was false, as was another
claim, made in the same rant, that he graduated in the top half of his
law-school class. Biden wrongly stated, too, that he had earned three
undergraduate degrees, when in fact he had earned one—a double major in
history and political science. Another round of press inquiries
followed, and Biden finally withdrew from the race on Sept. 23.
distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as
worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term
popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates an unseemly air of
hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race
was the right thing to do.
behavior matter? In and of itself, the plagiarism episode shouldn't
automatically disqualify Biden from regaining favor and credibility,
especially if in the intervening two decades he's not done more of the
same, as seems to be the case. But no one has looked into it. The press
should give his record since 1988 a thorough vetting. It's worth
knowing whether the odds-on favorite to be our next vice president has
truly reformed himself of behavior that can often be the mark of a
deeply troubled soul.
sources seems especially wise. I relied on three books about the 1988
campaign: Jack Germond and Jules Witcover's Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988; Sidney Blumenthal's Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War; and Peter Goldman and Tom Mathews' The Quest for the Presidency 1988, along with articles from the New York Times and Washington Post.
1) Kinnock: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand
generations to be able to get into university? Why is Glenys the first
woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get into
university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Did they
lack talent? Those people who could sing and play and recite and write
poetry? The people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with
their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why
didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who
could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football?
Weak? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had
because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or
the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform
upon which they could stand."
Biden: "I started thinking as I was coming over
here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to
a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the
audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it
because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the
first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate
degree that I was smarter than the rest? Those same people who read
poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because
they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of
Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play
football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart.
It's not because they didn't work as hard. It's because they didn't
have a platform upon which to stand."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden's Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad," New York Times, Sept. 12, 1987.
2) Robert Kennedy: "The gross national product does
not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their
education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of
our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our
public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures
neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to
our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes
life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why
we are proud that we are Americans."
Biden: "We cannot measure the health of our
children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It
doesn't measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our
marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our
public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our
compassion nor our devotion to our country. That bottom line can tell
us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile,
and it can tell us everything about America except that which makes us
proud to be Americans."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.
3) Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend
history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of
events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history
of this generation."
Biden: "Well, few of us have the greatness to
bend history itself. But each of us can act to affect a small portion
of events, and in the totality of these acts will be written the
history of this generation."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.