As outlets like the New York Times commented at the time, Biden’s rhetoric here was a “Hart-like message.” The “Hart” was Gary Hart, the young ex-senator from Colorado who had become the face of Democratic neoliberalism and had lost out to Mondale for the Democratic nomination in 1984. Labor despised Hart, whom then–AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland had accused of “labor baiting” during the Democratic contest. For years, Biden and Hart would receive identical ratings from the AFL-CIO in the federation’s annual legislative scorecards, typically in the high 70s and low 80s—strikingly low compared to liberal Democrats in the Senate.41
After all this, however, Biden and the DLC’s theory of change was quickly debunked. In the 1986 midterm elections, with the GOP outspending Democrats five to one and the still-popular Reagan crisscrossing the country to ask the public to vote Republican one last time, the Democrats surprised everyone by reclaiming the Senate and enlarging their House majority. Ignoring the DLC’s prescriptions, the party ran candidates who were left of center economically. In return, union households voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, and the party’s advantage with women and especially African Americans (90 percent of whom voted Democratic nationally) made up for its shortfall with white men, providing winning margins in close races. Even in the South, liberal Democrats won by stitching together cross-racial coalitions.42
In theory, this Democratic takeover halted the “Reagan Revolution.” In practice, that revolution had already succeeded. Despite the 1986 election results, the Democratic Party had internalized the political lessons Biden and others had been urging, shying away from proposing any major big-spending programs while the DLC only grew in influence. And as the race for 1988 nomination heated up, Biden continued striving to be “the candidate of the South.”43
Replacing Reagan
After Mondale’s loss, many believed the next contest for the Democratic nomination would be a battle for the party’s soul. As commentators noted at the time, the prospective field looked to be a split between old-guard liberals, namely Ted Kennedy and New York governor Mario Cuomo, and the emerging “neoliberals,” whose leaders included Biden and Hart.44
In fact, no battle was even necessary. Both Cuomo and Kennedy chose not to run. Biden’s chances were given a further boost when the Miami Herald revealed in April 1987 that Hart, the frontrunner, had been carrying on an affair with 29-year-old model Donna Rice, precipitating his exit from the race. The only candidate left who posed any real alternative to Biden and his fellow neoliberals was Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Chicago-based civil rights leader taking his second crack at the nomination.
Jackson’s vision for the party was fundamentally different to that of the DLC, which he derisively termed the “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” Rather than move to the right to win back conservative voters who had defected to Reagan, his “Rainbow Coalition” aimed to bring together “the locked out, the rejected, the poor, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and native Americans” in a working-class movement based on economic justice—in other words, the very “special interest groups” Biden and his cohorts viewed as a threat to the “middle-class guy” they imagined as the mainstream. People around the country signed up for Jackson’s movement, including labor leaders, white farmers, black officials who had spurned him last time, and Burlington’s then-mayor Bernie Sanders, for whom Jackson’s campaign mirrored his own vision of building a working-class movement around a program of economic populism. The Democratic establishment panicked, especially when Jackson started drawing ever-more diverse crowds—with Hart’s exit, he was now the best-polling candidate. Party elites led by the DLC began organizing an “Anybody But Jesse” movement, believing not just that his program but his race made him an electoral loser, the latter cropping up again twenty years later when Barack Obama ran for president.45
Biden and Jackson had obliquely crossed swords before, being on opposite sides of the busing issue in the 1970s. Biden had had kind words for Jackson’s 1984 campaign anyway, telling reporters he could bring millions of unregistered black voters toward the party, particularly in the South.46
Now, however, Jackson was a threat, not just to Biden’s presidential ambitions but the direction he wanted to move the Democrats. “You can’t try to pit the Rainbow Coalition, blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, gays, against the middle class,” Biden said at the 1986 NAACP convention.47
He quickly distinguished himself as the only candidate willing to go after Jackson directly. At the same NAACP event, Biden urged the crowd to “reject the voices in the movement who tell black Americans to go it alone … and that only blacks should represent blacks,” a less-than-subtle dig at Jackson, who had recently campaigned for a black primary challenger in New Jersey over a white Democratic incumbent. “Ignore those voices … that simplistically reduce the public debate to a choice between rich and poor, disregarding the crisis of the middle class,” he told Louisiana Democrats, another dig at Jackson. Particularly controversial was his decision, four years after drawing cheers for saying he was “seeking the vice presidential nomination on the Jesse Jackson ticket,” to expressly rule out putting Jackson on a Joe Biden ticket. In the eyes of anti-Jackson Democrats, Biden was the only candidate with the “guts” to say what all the others were thinking. Meanwhile, Jackson gave as good as he got, traveling to Wilmington where he criticized “Democratic centrists … riding with the Kennedy credentials on the coattails of Reaganite reaction” and attacked deficit-cutters who were “combing their hair to the left like Kennedy and moving their policies to the right like Reagan.”48
Everyone knew who Jackson meant. Biden was running an expressly Kennedyesque campaign that leaned heavily on his youth, good looks, and charisma. Biden explained that he didn’t “think presidents get elected on specifics,” but rather “broader notions of what their vision for America is.” That message was cooked up by Pat Caddell. Failing to prod Biden into running for president in 1984, Caddell had simply transposed his Bidencentric strategy onto the similarly youthful and neoliberal Hart. A year later, Caddell helped craft what would come to be known as one of history’s worst marketing blunders: New Coke, which lasted 79 days before being pulled from the shelves.49
Caddell laid out his thinking on the coming election in a 92-page memo to IMPAC ’88, a group of millionaire party fundraisers devoted to pushing the Democratic Party to the right. Picking 1960 as the model for 1988 and Kennedy as the model for the right candidate, Caddell’s ideal nominee was an “inside insurgent” who would personify generational change without threatening the establishment, and hold conservative positions on issues like crime, abortion, the deficit, and the military. Caddell saw Baby Boomers—who would make up 58 percent of 1988 voters and were thought to be nonideological, nonpartisan, and antiestablishment—as key to any victory.
This became the ethos of the 1988 Biden campaign. “I can feel it in my fingers,” he said about the coming rise of the Boomer generation. “You can see the cultural manifestations. Somebody is going to be the political manifestation.” To that end, his stump speech served as a rolling travelogue of 1960s nostalgia, a self-consciously Kennedyesque paean heavy on vague but inspiring rhetoric about the possibilities of the future that frequently paid tribute to the former president and other slain ’60s liberal icons. “Just because our heroes were murdered doesn’t mean that the dream doesn’t lie buried deep within the hearts of tens of millions of us,” he told audiences in a version of the speech he had been giving for years. At the core of this was Biden’s misreading of history that Kennedy had “kindle[d] the bonfire that started the greatest generational movement in American politics since [Franklin] Roosevelt.” Nevertheless, delivered with Biden’s oratorical skill, speeches like these dazzled