A teetotaler in his personal life—Biden once even threatened to end a date if the girl didn’t throw away her cigarette—he rubbished the idea of legalizing marijuana. Acknowledging his wife was the brains of the operation, he nonetheless opted for her to stay home and “mold my children.” “I’m not a ‘keep ’em barefoot and pregnant’ man,” he said. “But I am all for keeping them pregnant until I have a little girl.”20
Biden’s short time in the New Castle County Council revealed a sharp, ambitious liberal politician genuinely concerned about poverty and environmental degradation and willing to stand up to corporate interests. He fought to block construction of oil refineries and protect vital wetlands,21 called for a halt to the dredging of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,22 denounced the destruction of tidal marshes, and tried to “de-escalate” the construction of a controversial superhighway that he called a “10-lane monstrosity.”23
Biden also criticized a report on public housing for not paying enough attention to the very poor and spoke out against the bulldozing of the dilapidated homes of the county’s poor black residents. Seeing a balance between the county’s growth and the preservation of its natural resources, he worked to restrict development, or at least slow it. He called for more funding for mass transit and denounced the “senseless highways” being built in its place.24
A county council seat was always going to be too small a pond for someone who had been eyeing the presidency since he was barely out of his teens, and Biden soon locked eyes on higher office. His hand was forced to an extent, with county Republicans scheming to redistrict him out of his seat. Consequently, it took less than a year after his victory for Biden to start mulling a run for the US Senate, a course he’d evidently decided on by the one-year anniversary, when he accidentally called himself a candidate in a speech. Biden’s ambition for higher office soon took priority above the issues that had supposedly animated his career in the first place. When the New Castle County Housing Authority made plans to buy an apartment complex in Biden’s district and convert it into public housing for the “nonelderly,” it did so with no involvement from the councilman himself, who was too busy campaigning to discuss the plan.25
The daunting task of unseating Republican J. Caleb “Cale” Boggs fell to Biden thanks to a combination of reluctance and ambition. A string of more experienced Democrats passed on almost certainly losing to the 63-year-old Boggs, who since 1946 had served as Delaware’s sole representative in the US House, governor, and now senator. When the opportunity to run consequently fell into Biden’s lap, the ambitious councilman took it, seeing in the race a perfect way to raise his profile, build a following, and set the table for a future campaign.26
That he would lose was a given. Boggs, a liberal Republican who in 1960 had unseated a conservative Democrat with the help of Democratic voters, was a universally well-liked figure in the state and had won seven straight elections, a state record. Moreover, Delaware hadn’t put a liberal Democrat in the Senate since 1940, and even he had only eked out a single term. Biden himself gave Boggs “five-to-one odds” of being reelected.27
Yet he ultimately wasn’t. How did Biden, a just-elected county councilman who had only recently decided he was a Democrat and wouldn’t even meet the US Senate’s age requirement when the polls closed, do it?
Biden vs. Boggs
On March 20, 1972, between 200 and 300 people gathered at the Hotel du Pont’s Du Barry Room, a venue for everything from wedding receptions to orchestra concerts. The occasion was a 29-year-old Joe Biden’s announcement of his Senate campaign. Biden delivered a brain-melting 40-minute speech—“a record of its kind in the state,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News’s Bill Frank—whose length and frequent digressions the public would soon know as Biden trademarks.28
With a decade of government-sanctioned lies, cover-ups, and violence having battered Americans’ faith in their political institutions, Biden zeroed in on the themes of trust and honesty. “We must regain our confidence in our traditions and in our institutions,” he told the crowd. “And to do that, we must have public officials who will take bold positions on important questions, men who will stand up and tell the people exactly what they think. I mean to be that kind of candidate—and I mean to be that kind of senator.” A few days later in a speech to Delaware Young Democrats, Biden tried out this truth-telling, disappointing the youthful crowd by opposing marijuana legalization and amnesty for draft-dodgers who had fled the country. “You may not agree with me but at least you’ll know where I stand,” he said.29
In truth, much of Biden’s announcement speech was pablum. Until prompted by reporters, he avoided the two hot-button issues of the day: Vietnam and busing. Delaware was solid Nixonland, and Biden carefully distanced himself from the president’s Democratic opponent, George McGovern. He called McGovern’s plan to pull all US troops out of Vietnam in 90 days “slightly impractical” and broke with the Democratic nominee on issues like defense cuts and welfare and tax reform. He continued to insist he wasn’t “as liberal as most people think,” and indeed, Delaware Democrats whispered that he was more conservative than his Republican opponent.30
But Biden got bolder as the campaign wore on. Biden assailed Nixon for reescalating US involvement in Vietnam and slammed Boggs repeatedly for votes that kept the war going, coming out in July for a withdrawal of US ground forces by October and the total end of US involvement once all prisoners of war were returned. After receiving enthusiastic applause during his announcement for saying anyone found guilty of a serious crime should be sent to prison “promptly,” he also centered the issues of crime and drugs. “When we find the pusher, we must deal more severely with him than with any other element of the criminal society,” he told one crowd. “There should be no mercy.” But tough talk aside, Biden’s solutions then were mostly on the nonpunitive side of things: more money for rehabilitation and job training, more psychiatric care for prisoners, additional counseling centers and halfway houses, and a federal job program for at-risk kids.31
Like many youthful candidates challenging an elderly incumbent, Biden subtly drew attention to Boggs’s age. A series of newspaper ads pointed to Biden’s platform while at the same time reminding readers of Boggs’s advanced years and subtly signaling to conservative voters. It was part of the campaign message developed personally by Biden: “Dear old dad may have been right for his time—and I love him—but things are different now.”32
What history has forgotten about Biden’s 1972 campaign, however, was its economic populism, even if it targeted middle-class Delawareans who he claimed were “being attacked by both the rich and the poor.” Americans were most concerned with their pocketbooks, he stressed upon announcing his candidacy, calling for automatic cost-of-living increases for Social Security, something he repeated until Election Day. He told a crowd of United Auto Workers (UAW) members that Congress was debating mere “percentage points” when it came to such increases; rather, they should be raised “to a level where people can live in dignity,” he said, suggesting an income-supplement program to be carved out of the program for older Americans who were ineligible. Biden later demanded those payments be removed from the income formula used for Medicaid eligibility lest elderly Delawareans be thrown off its rolls, and he called for Congress to create an independent consumer protection agency “to serve as the lawyer for consumers.” At one stop, spirited applause interrupted Biden as he attacked corporate income tax structures.33
Biden wasn’t afraid to name enemies. His criticism of the “millionaires who don’t pay any taxes at all” and the “billion-dollar corporations who want a ride on the public’s back” became a staple of his campaign. He ran full-page newspaper ads demanding the elimination of tax preferences for “special interests,” property tax exemptions for elderly people on fixed incomes, and freezes on prices, utility rates, and interest rates. “If you’re a working man, you cannot hope to escape taxes. If you’re a rich man, you may,” the ads charged. Biden hit Boggs for defending Standard