Biden in his prime
by Noemie Emery
| February 25, 2020 12:00 AM
"Someone once called Joe Biden the only 29-year-old underachiever ever elected to the United States Senate," Paul Taylor wrote in his 1989 opus See How they Run. Biden, he noted, whose 1988 presidential run had ended in disaster, tended to confuse words with action.
Mary McGrory once described him as "a collection of good instincts and incoherent utterance, pleasant, energetic, but not in control."
In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Drew wrote that he was "knocked out by a weakness that was going to catch up with him ... intellectual barrenness." He was a "nice guy who hasn’t demonstrated depth or mental or verbal discipline," and she saw no heft in his mantra of "change."
Jack Germond and Jules Witcover took up this idea and and ran with it, recalling that Biden had been forced from the race for plagiarizing whole pages from speeches by Robert F. Kennedy and British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Not only had he used these speeches without attribution, but he had used them as if he were discussing his own ideas and experiences, citing Kinnock’s ancestors, beleaguered Welsh miners, as if they were, in fact, his own. Biden’s father had not been a coal miner in Wales but a car dealer in Wilmington. And the grade inflation in drama and suffering he applied to his fictional distant relations he applied to himself and his life.
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