Biden continued to insist that the answers to US economic misfortune lay “beyond the reach of government” and criticized “the old Washington-based approach to economic policy.” America’s workplaces needed their own in-house daycare centers, he insisted, but not if the government mandated them; rather, the White House should make its own daycare center, because “if other chief executives see a president doing it, they will likely follow suit.” He promised to balance the budget by 1993, though without any tax hikes. Other big ideas were poached from his rivals, like having companies give workers 90 days’ notice when they closed plants. And he reminded the public about his conservative positions on busing and abortion.52
Biden didn’t entirely abandon the Democratic priorities of old, rolling out a plan to help the nation’s impoverished children. True to his philosophy, however, the plan was one-half government programs and one-half private volunteerism from corporations and the well-off. And even as he pledged worthy goals like letting poor kids under eleven get free health care, he promised less worthy ones, like making most anyone on welfare get jobs or join job training and educational programs. Others, like adding $1 to the minimum wage over four years, fell somewhere in the middle.53
As always, Biden had no trouble raising money. Over the course of just twenty-seven days in March, he raised a then–eye-popping $1.7 million, 70 percent more than any other candidate, and by July of that year, he would have $3.2 million, trailing only Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Much of this was on the back of his status as one of Israel’s “close friends” in Congress, with Israel lobbyists serving in various staff and fundraising roles for the campaign. Yet even with largely adoring press coverage, the money didn’t necessarily translate into overwhelming support: by the time he called it quits, he was polling at 10 percent in Iowa.54
Biden would have been at least a contender had his campaign not been engulfed by a quick succession of scandals in September. The first came when a Dukakis aide tipped the press off that passages in a Biden speech about his own family history were plagiarized from UK Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, who like Biden was trying to untether his party from its economically populist history. A few days later, the press revealed other passages had drawn, without attribution, on the past eloquence of Hubert Humphrey and Biden’s hero, Robert F. Kennedy. At the same time, it came out that Biden had failed a law class in 1965 after lifting five pages from a law review article for an assignment.55
Next to be exposed were Biden’s frequent allusions to his civil rights activism, a staple not just of his rose-tinted stump speech but often deployed during his fight to kill busing. During the campaign, he had talked about the time he and a group of classmates had gone to a local restaurant with the only black student in their class, only to leave when he was barred from eating there. The Philadelphia Inquirer tracked down Biden’s classmate, now working as a doctor in Philadelphia, who recalled that Biden and his party had never left the restaurant in solidarity—in fact, they hadn’t even realized he had been thrown out until they had already finished eating and left.56
Challenged by reporters, he now admitted that his activism had been “nothing of any consequence” and that he had simply joined a picket of a segregated movie theater after working one summer at an all-black swimming pool, which had opened his eyes about racism for the first time. “I was never an activist,” Biden confessed. “The civil rights movement was an awakening for me, not as a consequence of my participation but as a consequence of my being made aware of what was happening,” he said.57
And it wasn’t just civil rights. That same month, Biden had painted himself as a Vietnam War opponent, recalling, “We all said, ‘That’s kind of stupid, but it’s going to end.’” But an old friend of Biden and Neilia’s told the press that Biden was “for a long time pretty much a supporter,” only changing his mind by the time he ran for Senate. Biden would admit that he had declined to take part in the movements he now extolled because “by the time the war movement was at its peak, I was married. I was in law school. I wore sports coats.” He added, “You’re looking at a middle-class guy…. I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts.”58
The wounded, limping campaign was finally given its mercy killing after Newsweek unearthed C-Span footage of an April 7 event in New Hampshire, where an audience member had asked Biden which law school he had attended and where he had placed. Perceiving it as a slight, Biden had reacted badly. He’d shot back that he had “ended up in the top half” of his class, graduated with three degrees, was “the outstanding student in the political science department,” and had gone to law school on a full academic scholarship. He then told the questioner he would “be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like.” All of this was proven to be untrue: Biden had placed toward the bottom of both his undergraduate and law school classes, had a single degree with a double major, had only been nominated for the political science award, and had received a partial scholarship based on financial need. “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he now explained.59
A different campaign might have weathered these scandals. But with little of substance undergirding it and tied up as it was in Biden as a personality and his straight-shooter, tell-’em-what-they-don’t-wanna-hear persona, the campaign hit a wall. On September 23, Biden entered the crowded hearing room to call it quits.
The humiliating exit from the race proved to be a blessing in disguise. Shortly after ending his campaign, Biden was finally examined for the painful headaches he’d been ignoring on the trail. After being hospitalized, doctors found one aneurysm at the base of Biden’s brain, then a second. He spent the next seven months recuperating from two high-risk cranial surgeries and an operation on a blood clot found in his lung, with a priest at one point reading him his last rites as he was wheeled into surgery. Had he stayed in the race, the doctors told him, he would have died on the campaign trail. Instead, he returned to the Senate in September 1988 to a hero’s welcome and with a seemingly wiser, more philosophical outlook.60
“I think I’m good at what I do,” he reflected. “I like very much what I do. I won’t voluntarily stop what I do.”
Black lives really do matter. But the problem is institutional racism in America. That’s the overarching problem that exists.
—Joe Biden, 20161
It was Labor Day weekend in 1980 when a young motorist found himself being tailed by an irate Joe Biden.
The young man had been speeding down an abandoned road when Biden, attending a nearby birthday party at his sister’s house, spotted him. Alarmed at the driver’s recklessness when his and the other parents’ kids were playing outside—and no doubt triggered by the trauma of the crash that had killed his first wife and baby daughter—Biden jumped into his car and chased him for more than half a mile, finally catching him across state lines in Pennsylvania. Making a citizen’s arrest, Biden charged the 26-year-old with reckless driving in magistrate court; he returned not once but three more times to make sure the charge was filed in a case that he, having made the arrest, would have to personally prosecute. Biden only dropped the charge after the motorist started desperately calling him every day, telling him he was a hard worker, this was his one and only such joy ride, and he could lose his license if convicted. Asked by the Wilmington News Journal after he dropped the case if he was just avoiding prosecuting a potential voter, Biden replied: “I wouldn’t have minded that. It would have been fun.”2
This wasn’t the first time Biden had dabbled in some minor vigilante justice. Three years earlier, he had chased down two purse snatchers and returned the stolen goods to the victim. But this incident was different