Biden's Familiar Quotations

By WALTER SHAPIRO

It should have been the best of times, but it was the worst of times for Joseph Biden. For months it had been a truth universally acknowledged: that the Senator in want of the presidency could revive his flagging candidacy as he presided over the Robert Bork confirmation hearings. But, oh, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Before Bork even took the witness stand, Biden learned the hard way that 1988 presidential politics has become a school for scandal. Now many believe that Biden's beleaguered candidacy has almost certainly shuffled off its mortal coil. But the defiant candidate still insists that the whole flap is "much ado about nothing."

One thing is for sure: Joe Biden has surmounted his name-recognition problem. In fact, he received more exposure last week than he may be able to bear. Serious students of public affairs probably noticed that he performed competently, but far from memorably, at the Bork hearings. But what most voters are more likely to remember was the endless TV sequences of Biden's words on the campaign trail juxtaposed with almost identical oratory coming from the mouth of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. English teachers in New Hampshire high schools were soon using Biden as the bad example in lessons on the evils of plagiarism.

What might be called the Glib Crib Crisis began when the New York Times revealed that Biden had been guilty of rhetorical shoplifting. Biden's passionate and seemingly personal closing statement in a Democratic debate in Iowa in late August had been swiped without attribution and almost word for word from a Kinnock TV commercial designed to evoke memories of the British class struggle. Where Kinnock's coal-mining ancestors worked "eight hours underground," Biden's somewhat mythical forebears "would come up after twelve hours." Biden in the past had given credit to Kinnock, but in Iowa he introduced the fiery rhetoric by deceptively claiming, "I started thinking as I was coming over here . . ." To make matters worse, Biden repeated the offense in a tape he made three days later for the National Education Association.

It was clearly folly for Biden to expropriate Kinnock's family tree as he conjured up coal-mining ancestors "who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse." But hitherto, politics has been far more tolerant of borrowings from Bartlett's than of monkey business in Bimini. In fact, some of the most famous lines of modern oratory have questionable paternity. Winston Churchill's "blood, toil, tears and sweat" was inspired by John Donne; John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" echoed Oliver Wendell Holmes; and Ronald Reagan's 1980 debate cry, "I am paying for this microphone," was apparently lifted from a 1948 movie, State of the Union.

Why, then, has Biden become a modern-day Jean Valjean, condemned to suffer permanently for the political equivalent of stealing a loaf of bread? Biden is more than a hapless victim, since his Gatling-gun rhetoric certainly compounded the problem. Still, the Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.

1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. "The basic rap against Biden," explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, "is that he's a candidate of style, not substance."

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people's ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because "he didn't know what he was saying. He was on autopilot."

4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting.

5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.

6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself "stupid" and his actions "a mistake." Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was "ludicrous" to attribute every political idea.

Was the peculiar timing of the barrage of Biden brickbats accidental? The Des Moines Register reported that an unidentified campaign had circulated an "attack video" linking Kinnock's and Biden's rhetoric. A reporter for a Florida legal newspaper, the Miami Review, was also tipped off last week about the law school plagiarism incident and alerted a sister publication, Washington's Legal Times. In trying to confirm the information, reporters for the paper talked to a variety of Washington political insiders, including an adviser to the Richard Gephardt campaign.

Whatever the justice of the case, Biden's campaign does appear seriously wounded by the latest outbreak of the New Politics of Rectitude. Biden vowed that his campaign will continue, but barring some cleansing act of valor, he may be doomed to limp along until the chance comes to withdraw honorably from the fray. In the end, Biden may be remembered as the candidate who truly offered the voters an echo and not a choice.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington