A Cuppa Joe Biden
Scrapbook A Cuppa Joe Biden In his roundup of this cycle’s presidential books (“Read, Weep, and Vote,” Dec. 3, 2007), Andrew Ferguson assessed then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s volume,...
...But there is something unforgettable about watching the man emerge on the page...
...In view of Biden’s selection to be Barack Obama’s running mate, we thought you might enjoy rereading Ferguson’s comments on Biden from that article: “What does a discerning reader learn from Biden’s book that we didn’t already know...
...But his wife seems to agree...
...Choosing McCain, in particular, would herald the construction of a bridge to the 20th century—and not necessarily the last part of it, either...
...It’s confusing, yes, but Biden’s explanations serve a dual purpose: He appears forthright even as he tries to bury once and for all the accusations that forced him from presidential contention 20 years ago...
...Perhaps not much, if you’re a regular watcher of C-SPAN or a longtime resident of Delaware...
...Like most conventional campaign books, Promises to Keep is so light in tone, so breezily written, that it becomes, paradoxically, extremely difficult to read...
...No Truman, whose foreign policy set the course for the postwar era...
...Now, officially, they are ‘old news,’ the settled stuff of history and memoir...
...Sentences We Didn’t Finish ‘If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth...
...His legendary self-regard becomes more impressive when the reader sees it in typescript, undistracted by the smile and the hair plugs...
...Its superficiality and general insincerity may explain why the traditional campaign book has become a dying genre...
...Still, The Scr apbook would think that, at a national convention where the delegates listened patiently to the likes of Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, a minute or two might have been set aside in memory of the president who, as much as any Democrat, invented his party’s current ideology, and set the stage for Barack Obama...
...I’ve made life difficult for myself,’ he writes, ‘by putting intellectual consistency and personal principle above expediency.’ “Yes, many Biden fans might tag these as the greatest of his gifts...
...The Party of LBJ Anybody who thinks politics can’t be a brutal, unsentimental business— as THE SCRAPBOOK believes— should think back to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City...
...3, 2007), Andrew Ferguson assessed then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s volume, Promises to Keep, which told the amazing story of Biden’s upbringing as the poor son of a coal miner in Wales, his ascent through the ranks of the Labour party, and his accomplishments as the first member of his family in a thousand generations to go to university...
...To any detailed questions about them that might arise from young reporters covering his current campaign, he can say: Just read my book...
...Or something like that...
...McCain represents a cold-war style of nationalism that doesn’t get the shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics, the centrality of soft power in a multipolar world, or the transformative nature of . . . ” (Jacob Weisberg, Newsweek, September 1, 2008...
...Your integrity?’ “This lachrymose moment came during Biden’s aborted presidential campaign in 1988, when reporters discovered several instances of plagiarism in his campaign speeches and in his law school record...
...Biden quotes at great length from letters of recommendation he received as a young man, when farsighted professors wrote movingly of his ‘sharp and incisive intellect’ and his ‘highly developed sense of responsibility.’ These qualities have proved to be more of a burden than you might think, Biden admits...
...Yes, there was a smaller —much smaller—portrait of JFK behind the stage, but it was one-third of a triptych featuring Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman (who was very much alive, but did not attend...
...Leading Indicator...
...A fun-loving student, he had skipped the class in which the rules of citation were taught...
...Scrapbook A Cuppa Joe Biden In his roundup of this cycle’s presidential books (“Read, Weep, and Vote,” Dec...
...In Biden’s case, the ritual also allows him to dismiss these old charges by placing them in the least clarifying light possible...
...Biden rehearses the episode in tormenting, if selective, detail, and true to campaign-book form, his account serves as the emotional center of the book...
...His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to...
...A good friend of THE SCRAPBOOK called gleefully last week...
...As for the lines he’d lifted from others and dropped into his own speeches— these were misunderstandings...
...After a little hemming and hawing—is it his intelligence that he most admires, or his commitment to principle, or his insistence on calling ’em as he sees ’em, or what?—he decides that his greatest personal and political virtue is probably his integrity...
...The Scr apbook was, frankly, astonished: Last Wednesday was even LBJ’s centennial, for gosh sakes—but not a peep...
...He recounts one difficult episode in which she said as much...
...His wife is a high-powered television correspondent...
...It is possible, of course, that the omission was deliberate—Johnson, of course, was the principal author of the Vietnam war—and it is equally possible that Senator Obama (who was born in 1961) and senior members of his campaign apparatus have only the haziest notion of what Truman and Johnson—and FDR and JFK, for that matter—actually did as presidents...
...That’s a lot to ask, however...
...Fast-forward 44 years to Denver, where the Democrats have just nominated their first black candidate for president, and you would expect that Lyndon Johnson—creator of the Great Society, the man who pushed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act through Congress, and appointed the first black cabinet member and Supreme Court justice—would be mentioned, if ever so briefly, in the course of his party’s convention...
...and no LBJ, whose vision of civil rights and the role of the federal government remains the Democratic standard...
...but those long paragraphs taken verbatim from other people’s work were simply an oversight—a matter of not knowing how to cite sources properly...
...President John F. Kennedy had been shot to death just 9 months earlier, yet the podium was flanked—no, dwarfed—by two gigantic, multistory photographs of the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson...
...In this event, the world’s judgment will be severe and inescapable: the United States had its day, but in the end couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race...
...In at least one instance, a speechwriter had inserted a quote from Bobby Kennedy into Biden’s speech without attribution, meaning that while Biden was delivering remarks he knew he hadn’t written, he was also delivering remarks that he didn’t know his speechwriter hadn’t written...
...It’s true that he was disciplined for plagiarizing a paper in law school, he says offhandedly...
...The memoir of every presidential candidate must describe a Political Time of Testing, some point at which, if the narrative arc is to prove satisfying, the hero encounters criticism, most of it unjust, but then rallies, overcomes hardship and misfortune and the petty, self-serving attacks of enemies, and emerges chastened but wiser—and, come to think of it, more qualified to lead the greatest nation on earth...
...Indeed, when Barack Obama spoke to the multitudes on Thursday night, the only predecessors he mentioned were Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy...
...Tough call...
...But you would be wrong...
...Biden himself isn’t so sure...
...Of all the things to attack you on,’ she said, almost in tears...
...In 30 years,” he said, “my wife has never covered the winner of a political race”—he paused dramatically—“she has just been assigned to Barack Obama...
Vol. 13 • September 2008 • No. 48
