Joe Biden: Sleeper Candidate

This column was written by Bill Whalen.

As Rip nodded off in the summer of 1987, his party was mobilizing to take down a conservative Supreme Court nominee. Rip's fellow Dems needed the win: They'd lost two national elections during the decade to a president they were convinced was a lunkhead; opinions differed over whether the party needed to chart a more moderate course. But Rip remembered that help was on the way in the form of New York's most glamorous Democrat (Mario Cuomo), who was the odds-on-favorite to be the next president. Not much has changed.

And there's been one other constant in Rip's life: Joe Biden, now as then, running for president.

Biden, Delaware's senior Democratic senator and a presidential hopeful in 1987 (before his campaign scandalously flamed out — we'll get to that in a moment), is not a formal candidate. But earlier this summer he took the first step in that direction, launching a political action committee called Unite Our States. Its purpose, Biden said at a June press conference, was to address "the challenges facing our country by beginning to unite red and blue states, big cities and small towns, and Americans of all walks of life."

The second sure-fire sign that Biden is running is that he's writing a book. Random House, his publisher, calls it "the story of his remarkable 30-year career in the United States Senate — from journeyman days as a 29-year old Senator too young to be sworn in, to his rise to become one of the most powerful Democrats."

So what is Biden really up to? As one of at least four Democratic senators looking to go national in 2008, he could be simply trying to cut in line ahead of Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, who's positioning himself as the un-Hillary: a centrist from the Midwest. Or it could be a more complicated ploy. Biden, who turns 63 in November, will have to decide whether to seek a seventh Senate term come 2008. If he runs a wrecking-ball campaign aimed against all Democrats save Hillary, Biden, the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, presumably would stand a good chance at being secretary of state in a second Clinton administration.

Either way, a Biden candidacy would be the answer to a political trivia question: Name anyone who twice ran for president, taking a 20-year break in between campaigns. Which leads to another question, is Biden Version 2.0 better positioned than the original model?

In theory, Biden has advantages that other '08 hopefuls don't. As the only Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee making presidential overtures, he'll get plenty of airtime when the Roberts confirmation hearings convene (it's easy to come across as moderate, sitting next to Patrick Leahy, Edward Kennedy, and Charles Schumer). And, as the ranking Democrat on Foreign Relations Committee, he's a fixture on the Sunday talk-show circuit — a luxury he didn't have back in the summer of 1987 (rather than schlepping across Iowa and New Hampshire to get noticed, Biden first hinted at a presidential run during a Face the Nation appearance).

But who exactly is Biden's audience? Is it center-to-right voters in states his party automatically writes off — which would explain the senator's visits this year to South Carolina and Kentucky? An appearance earlier this month on Jon Stewart's Daily Show exhibited the difficulty a Democrat will have in reaching out to the center without leading too far off the base. Biden did strike one bipartisan note with Stewart by saying it would be "an honor" to run on a fusion ticket with John McCain. But earlier in the same interview — pandering to his audience — he railed against U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, imprudently calling President Bush's recess appointment "flat-out abusing power."

In order for his centrist strategy to work, Biden will have to be a more disciplined and mature candidate. After all, that's what contributed to his early collapse the first time he sought the presidency.

Eighteen years ago, Biden's campaign unraveled only three-and-a-months after he first announced when it was revealed — by a rival operative, who leaked incriminated videotapes to the press — that the Delaware senator has been plagiarizing other politicians' material, including words from a television ad by former British Labor leader Neil Kinnock and speeches by Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey.

The Kennedy theft went as follows:

RFK, in 1968: The gross national product ... 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 devotion to our country.

Biden, in 1987: This standard ... 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.

However, the Kinnock mimicry was more grievous offense since Biden used his words to reinvent his own biography. In reality, Biden grew in up suburban Wilmington, the son of a car salesman and grandson of a Pennsylvania state senator. But that's not the middle-class story voters heard in the summer of 1987:

Kinnock: Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak, those people who worked eight hours underground and then come up and play football, weak? It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Biden: Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family to ever go to a university? Was it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? 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? It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand.

Combining this intellectual larceny with a couple of ill-timed temper tantrums and exaggerated academic prowess (reporters dug into the senator's transcripts and discovered that he finished 76th out of 85 in his Syracuse law class) and Biden's candidacy had all the believability of George Costanza discoursing about architecture.

Will Biden do better this go-round? Whereas an extramarital affair can be a one-strike-you're-out offense for candidates, it's not clear what the statute of limitations is on sexing up speeches. But it will help if Biden abstains from rhetoric that comes not only from across the ocean, but a galaxy far, far away. Kinnock's "thousand generations" phrase was used a decade earlier by another British celebrity, Sir Alec Guinness, playing the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi: "For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times, before the empire."

If indeed he sincerely wants to refashion himself as a consensus candidate but he hasn't kicked the plagiarist habit, Biden would do well to ditch Kinnock (known to his critics as "the Welsh windbag") in favor of Churchill, Thatcher, or Disraeli. Or, by 2008, he can revert to the old standby: "are you better off now than you were eight years."

Just so it doesn't come out as: "are you being served?"

Bill Whalen is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he follows California and national politics.

By Bill Whalen
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