entities. The Democrats’ new priority would instead be Biden’s “middle-class guy,” at least as they imagined him: socially conservative, suspicious of government and taxes, and otherwise curiously aligned with the political desires of the country’s most powerful interests.35
And he was Southern. Biden had been urging Democrats to look to the South for ideas and presidential material since the 1970s, allying himself with Jimmy Carter and encouraging conservative South Carolina senator Fritz Hollings to run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. The party’s successive electoral collapses had won the Democratic leadership to Biden’s side. “Unless we … have the South with us, we will not control the national agenda,” he said. “For the first time, New York Democrats and California Democrats and Illinois Democrats are all saying that we must have a presidential candidate in 1988 who will appeal to the South.”36
Biden wasn’t wrong: the “solid South” had indeed been pivotal to Democratic victories for generations, thanks to the party’s virulent support for slavery and white supremacy. When Democrats began embracing civil rights under Roosevelt, the South’s outsize power would remain a brake on progressive change for decades, thwarting civil rights legislation and weakening New Deal measures.
Like Biden, Roosevelt had understood the South’s electoral importance. He’d tried to politically reshape it in his own image and push the region to “a more intelligent form of Democracy,” but he failed to dislodge the right-wing Southern elite, despite his and the New Deal’s popularity there. The South would remain an anti-union, economically conservative political backwater. Biden’s effort to win it back could have revived Roosevelt’s effort, capitalizing on new civil rights protections and Democratic popularity among black voters to run a populist campaign that brought blacks and poor whites together through their shared economic interests. Instead, Biden made clear he desired not to bring the South to where Democrats stood, but vice versa. “The party has lost its way,” Biden told Democrats in North Carolina. “You have been where the Democratic Party was and now the Democratic Party must be where you are.”37
Instrumental to this was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an unofficial party organization founded after Mondale’s loss to push the Democrats rightward. Its founder, Al From, had been the executive director of the House Democratic Caucus in 1981, when it had put out a statement of “Democratic Economic Principles” that pledged fealty to Reagan’s agenda. Made up of governors and congressmen—almost all of them white men and mostly hailing from the West and especially the South—the DLC hoped to give the latter region greater influence in the party. This all came at the same time as a small group of the party’s fundraisers, including Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin, similarly decided to make the Democrats into a centrist, business-friendly force. 38
Biden was a natural fit with the group. In fact, From and Biden’s pollster friend Pat Caddell had already unsuccessfully tried to get him to jump into the 1984 race as the standard-bearer for their preferred policies. They polled the appeal of a made-up “Mr. Smith” who resembled Biden against the other candidates and planned to use the results to pressure House Democrats to abandon Mondale. Though he had declined to run then, Biden was now, in From’s words, one of the DLC’s “leaders,” and with a wide-open 1988 contest in mind, he embarked on a tour across the South with the DLC, lecturing Democrats that they needed to change.39
Calling North Carolina the “conscience of the South,” Biden “most persistently pursued a southern theme in his remarks” at one event, despite being the only speaker not from the South, noted a bemused local columnist. In Virginia, he professed the party would be “much better off” if its conservative Democratic senator Chuck Robb, the chairman of the DLC, ran for president. In Alabama, Sen. Howell Heflin praised Biden for his fiscal conservatism and for being sympathetic to the South’s “traditions and values”; returning the favor, Biden told the crowd “a black man has a better chance in Birmingham than in Philadelphia or New York.” He cut from his speech the usual lines about his fictive civil rights activism and a reference to Birmingham Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor’s use of dogs against black protesters. Conservative columnist Dick Williams of Georgia, who boasted of breaking a union at a television station as a young man, put Biden among the party’s “best and brightest” ahead of his appearance there.40
Anti-unionism was central to the ideology of the DLC and the “New Democrats,” as they came to be called, and despite the critical role organized labor had played in his career, Biden began faintly echoing these sentiments. At the Florida AFL-CIO’s annual convention in 1985, he delivered a keynote speech blaming labor for its own decline, chiding unions for fearing change and focusing on their own interests instead of the national interest. The following year, at the Virginia state AFL-CIO’s convention, he warned that labor, like the Democratic Party, was in “deep trouble” and needed to “have a broader umbrella” to “envelop middle-class America” so that it was no longer viewed as a “special interest.” Stumping for a House candidate who he warned was not an automatic pro-labor vote, Biden told another union audience: “You’re not entitled to anymore, and you’re lucky if you get that much.”
As outlets like the New York Times commented at the time, Biden’s rhetoric here was a “Hart-like message.” The “Hart” was Gary Hart, the young ex-senator from Colorado who had become the face of Democratic neoliberalism and had lost out to Mondale for the Democratic nomination in 1984. Labor despised Hart, whom then–AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland had accused of “labor baiting” during the Democratic contest. For years, Biden and Hart would receive identical ratings from the AFL-CIO in the federation’s annual legislative scorecards, typically in the high 70s and low 80s—strikingly low compared to liberal Democrats in the Senate.41
After all this, however, Biden and the DLC’s theory of change was quickly debunked. In the 1986 midterm elections, with the GOP outspending Democrats five to one and the still-popular Reagan crisscrossing the country to ask the public to vote Republican one last time, the Democrats surprised everyone by reclaiming the Senate and enlarging their House majority. Ignoring the DLC’s prescriptions, the party ran candidates who were left of center economically. In return, union households voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, and the party’s advantage with women and especially African Americans (90 percent of whom voted Democratic nationally) made up for its shortfall with white men, providing winning margins in close races. Even in the South, liberal Democrats won by stitching together cross-racial coalitions.42
In theory, this Democratic takeover halted the “Reagan Revolution.” In practice, that revolution had already succeeded. Despite the 1986 election results, the Democratic Party had internalized the political lessons Biden and others had been urging, shying away from proposing any major big-spending programs while the DLC only grew in influence. And as the race for 1988 nomination heated up, Biden continued striving to be “the candidate of the South.”43
Replacing Reagan
After Mondale’s loss, many believed the next contest for the Democratic nomination would be a battle for the party’s soul. As commentators noted at the time, the prospective field looked to be a split between old-guard liberals, namely Ted Kennedy and New York governor Mario Cuomo, and the emerging “neoliberals,” whose leaders included Biden and Hart.44
In fact, no battle was even necessary. Both Cuomo and Kennedy chose not to run. Biden’s chances were given a further boost when the Miami Herald revealed in April 1987 that Hart, the frontrunner, had been carrying on an affair with 29-year-old model Donna Rice, precipitating his exit from the race. The only candidate left who posed any real alternative to Biden and his fellow neoliberals was Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Chicago-based civil rights leader taking his second crack at the nomination.
Jackson’s vision for the party was fundamentally different to that of the DLC, which he derisively
