Biden His Time

"I guess every single word I've ever said is going to be dissected now." --???

WHO SAID that? 'Twasn't Robert Bork. It was, however, his Grand Inquisitor, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. Every day heaps new embarrassments upon the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his presidential campaign is in trouble. Gary Hart may have fudged his birth date and shortened his name. But though Biden has yet to be caught with his pants down, his shortcomings are now no less exposed than those of his former Senate colleague.

First The New York Times ran a page one story on the, shall we say, similarities between a Biden peroration in an August debate in Iowa and a moving and brilliantly effective Neil Kinnock speech shown in an advertisement during the British elections. Then it turned out Biden had lifted, without attribution, a lengthy passage from another famous and eloquent speech Robert Kennedy made during the 1968 presidential campaign.

This sort of stuff goes on all the time. There are few really new ideas left. Political speechwriters more than earn their wage if they can come up with genuinely new and elegant formulations of tired old cliches. Ted Sorenson made John Kennedy sound like a Boston Bard by doing just that.

But the Biden story didn't end here. If it had, we could at least have given him the Milton Berle award for knowing (and stealing) good material when he sees it. His problems, unfortunately, run deeper and deservedly should KO his presidential candidacy.

IT'S NOT that he was a terrible student in law school, though his performace there is not exactly an encouraging barometer of his intellect. (He finished 76th in a class of 85.) It's not even that he somehow failed to cite a law review article from which he copied five pages of text word-for-word in a paper he wrote in his first year in law school. Taken in isolation, these are mere peccadillos. What is disturbing is how insecure he clearly feels about his brainpower.

Examples span settings sublime and ridiculous. The sublime: Biden simply was unimpressive in his questioning of Bork. He rarely completed sentences, and continually flashed cheesy smiles as he asked the judge to repeat himself over and over "just so I can get this straight." The ridiculous: "I think I have a much higher IQ than you do," he snapped to someone named Frank at a New Hampshire event last year.

Jabbing his finger, he claimed to have gone to law school on a full academic scholarship, finished in the top half of his class, won an international moot court competition and been named the outstanding student in political science at a college he said he graduated from with three degrees. "And," Biden said, delivering the coup de grace, "I'd be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you'd like, Frank." So there.

It wasn't exactly Ollie North challenging Abu Nidal mano-a-mano. But however Frank might fare against Biden braino-a-braino, he'd be hard pressed to lose a veracity contest to the senator. All of Biden's claims were false. "I exaggerate when I'm angry," he said by way of explanation. Similarly, his aides tried to explain away his appropriation of Kinnock's speech and ancestry by saying that he had gone on "automatic pilot."

That's not good enough. Remember his outburst against George Shultz last summer? Who wants a president who flies off the handle every time he goes on auto pilot? All candidates like Biden have going for them are their character. With few legislative accomplishments to speak of, and few issues they can call their own, that is what they must try to sell to the public.

The revelations of the last two weeks and his weak responses to them indicate that Biden has no character. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, "there's no there there." That's why when he goes on automatic he is forced to make things up or steal them from others. Have there been no formative events in his life of which to speak? Nothing inside which he can fall back on? I bet Biden doesn't even realize that when Kinnock spoke of his ancestors playing football after a long day's work, he was talking about soccer.

ALL CANDIDATES, of course, are packaged by themselves and their handlers. The same was true in George Washington's day. But this is especially true for Biden. Before the 1984 campaign, Democratic campaign guru Pat Caddell wrote out a scenario for how "Candidate Smith" could win the Democratic nomination and hopefully go on to victory in November. Candidate Smith was supposed to be Senator Biden.

Caddell fashioned a campaign that presumably would appeal to "The Big Chill" crowd. The idea was to invoke the spirit of J.F.K.'s "New Frontier" and the "commitment" of the '60s. Biden didn't have the fire in the belly in '84, and Caddell brought his master plan to Gary Hart. After that election he updated the script for 1988 and got the leading man he'd wanted all along.

Biden played along but his candidacy went nowhere. So he decided to take on a different role and portray "a middle-class guy" who wasn't "big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts" in the '60s. (Presumably because he was too busy screwing up in law school.) Now an adviser, probably Pat Caddell, is saying that Biden's latest troubles will "free" him to "get into being himself." The new self is an aggressive "populist, anti-Establishment" candidate and arch-defender of the middle class. Who knows? Maybe he'll bounce back, stay in and run a strong race. If he does, I have some hot George Wallace speeches he might be interested in.