Carter was just the kind of unorthodox Democrat Biden aspired to be: socially conservative but enlightened on race and waging a fight against the corroded culture of Washington with the help of a small circle of hometown advisors. Biden likely saw much of his own 1972 run in Carter’s unlikely bid. The perennial outsider even after winning, Carter waged a lonely, unpopular war on government spending and fought the ongoing economic decline that defined his administration partly through deregulation of trucking, airlines, banking, and other industries.
Even so, Biden’s habit of spouting deliberately, some would say obnoxiously, contrarian talking points sometimes made an awkward fit for the role of campaign surrogate. Biden criticized the Carter campaign to reporters and at one point told the Associated Press at an Iowa rally that independent candidate Eugene McCarthy “would be the best qualified” for president. Carter would later lose Iowa by the barest of margins, partly because McCarthy got 2 percent of the vote.85
That Carter, the Democrat, became the country’s first neoliberal president anticipated where US political culture would swerve in the coming decade. It also mirrored Biden’s own evolution away from the New Deal tradition. As early as 1974, Biden had started to describe himself as a social liberal who was conservative fiscally, a subtle change to his earlier self-classifications. Two years later, he rapped Humphrey for not being “cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems” and lacking “the intestinal fortitude to look at some programs and say ‘no.’”86 His 1978 reelection campaign would push him more completely in this direction.
Biden’s chances looked good. With polls suggesting he would be a tough opponent, his most formidable potential rival, former House Rep. Pierre “Pete” du Pont, had instead run for and won the governor’s office. The current House Rep. Thomas Evans declined for the same reason. The state’s GOP was left with two options: the ultraconservative anti-busing activist Jim Venema, who had vowed to take Biden’s seat after his pro-busing vote on the Gurney amendment, or some less embarrassing Republican to stop Venema from taking the nomination. The party ended up going with James Baxter, a Sussex County farmer who, despite Venema’s grassroots support and dominance in small-dollar donations, became the nominee by just under 2,000 votes in a low-turnout primary.87
Biden had already covered his right flank on social policy. “I don’t know how in God’s name Jim Venema is going to be able to paint Joe Biden as a pro-buser,” he remarked. He bristled at suggestions he’d been pushed to where he now stood. “Venema’s full of crap,” he said. “I am not a political charlatan who does not operate out of principle.” Now he started the same covering maneuver on economics, introducing in 1977 an even more stringent version of William Roth’s “sunset” bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically cease to exist—what he termed “spending control legislation.” (The final compromise bill stretched this to ten years). Casting one of twenty-one votes against a bill to keep Social Security solvent, Biden complained that the bill put “a disproportionate burden on the middle-income folks.”88
The election took place in the shadow of the “taxpayers’ revolt” of 1978, one which had been rumbling before then. As inflation squeezed the wages of middle- and upper-middle-class earners—caught between incomes that rose to keep up with inflation and tax brackets that stayed the same and already leery of redistributive programs that seemed to mostly help other people—property owners around the country seethed. In California, Ronald Reagan’s home state and ground zero for the revolt, popular anger helped pass Proposition 13, which put severe limits on the state government’s taxation powers.89
In the long term, Prop 13 would create a fiscal crisis in the state and ravage its public services and institutions. In the short term, it lit a fire under middle-class homeowners across the country, producing imitators in state after state. Less than three years after its passage, eighteen states had placed limits on taxes and/or government spending, including Michigan’s 1978 Headlee Amendment to the state constitution.90
“1978 has turned out to be the year of the conservative,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News. Biden, who a year earlier had confidently predicted no one “more conservative than Bill Roth” could win statewide in Delaware, now fretted about the upcoming election in interviews and snapped at questions about where exactly he sat on the political spectrum. “What kind of question is that?” he told a reporter. “Are you still beating your wife?”91
The federal tax cut introduced by Roth and New York Congressman Jack Kemp was a child of this taxpayer revolt: a measure that would have slashed personal tax rates by 33 percent and corporate rates by 6 percent. At Baxter’s urging, Biden—now insisting that “on fiscal matters I’m a conservative” and making a cap on government spending the crux of his pitch to voters—became one of a small group of Senate Democrats pledging to vote for it. “We need a massive tax cut this year,” he said, reasoning that it would turn up the pressure to cut spending.92
Despite his popularity and the clear lack of enthusiasm for Baxter, Biden’s strategy against his Republican opponent was to snatch his platform. At a September candidate forum, they took turns criticizing federal spending, with Biden talking up his “sunset” legislation and boasting that he’d been rated the sixth most fiscally conservative senator by the National Taxpayers Union in 1974. In their first debate later that month, the two agreed on everything but abortion, and Biden informed the crowd he was already doing the things Baxter was calling for: cutting taxes, spending, and regulations. His campaign took out full-page ads touting his fiscally conservative record, including blocking pay raises and automatic cost-of-living increases for the nearly 3 million federal workers. They christened Biden “one of the stingiest senators.” Biden later repeated that line in a candidate question-and-answer, in which he talked about balancing the budget by 1983 and tying tax cuts to spending decreases. As he explained, the primary difference between him and Baxter was that he at least still believed government had “social obligations” to meet the needs of the most vulnerable.93
Biden’s anti-spending proselytizing won him the endorsement of Howard Jarvis, the anti-government California businessman who championed Prop 13. “You have shown yourself to be in the forefront of the battle to reduce government spending and bring relief to the overburdened taxpayers of this country,” Jarvis wrote. Biden’s office released a statement saying he was “delighted” with the endorsement. Yet Biden clearly recognized this rightward swing might disappoint the loyal Democratic voters he still needed. At a candidates’ forum a few days later, Biden told a mostly black audience about the dire consequences of measures like Prop 13. When confronted about the apparent hypocrisy, Biden, who six years earlier had made truth and integrity the cornerstone of his campaign, said he didn’t “have any feeling about [Jarvis’] endorsement” and couldn’t “help it whether someone endorses me or doesn’t endorse me.”94
Back in Washington, Biden showed why he’d received Jarvis’s support, becoming one of nineteen senators to vote against Hubert Humphrey’s watered-down full employment bill, which merely asked that the president meet certain unemployment and inflation targets by 1983. “I do not think the government ought to make promises it cannot keep,” Biden said. While he’d voted with a GOP majority against the Democrats only 13 percent of the time in his first five years, now that rate leaped to 22 percent.95
With Biden’s rightward lurch leaving Baxter little to work with, the Sussex County GOP chairman resorted to a series of desperate, manufactured scandals. All of it went nowhere. Baxter floundered in the polls, which revealed that not only did a measly share of voters (9 percent) vote for him due to his conservatism, but that Delawareans were well aware of Biden’s flip-flopping on issues like busing and planned to vote for him anyway. “In spite of his horrendous record, like all Delaware politicians, of opposing busing, he will vote the way I would want him to most of the time,” one liberal voter said.
Like Boggs had in 1972, Biden secured major newspaper endorsements, including the neighboring Philadelphia Inquirer, and he made a clean sweep of labor endorsements; Biden was still a relatively reliable liberal vote, at least more