bring together “the locked out, the rejected, the poor, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and native Americans” in a working-class movement based on economic justice—in other words, the very “special interest groups” Biden and his cohorts viewed as a threat to the “middle-class guy” they imagined as the mainstream. People around the country signed up for Jackson’s movement, including labor leaders, white farmers, black officials who had spurned him last time, and Burlington’s then-mayor Bernie Sanders, for whom Jackson’s campaign mirrored his own vision of building a working-class movement around a program of economic populism. The Democratic establishment panicked, especially when Jackson started drawing ever-more diverse crowds—with Hart’s exit, he was now the best-polling candidate. Party elites led by the DLC began organizing an “Anybody But Jesse” movement, believing not just that his program but his race made him an electoral loser, the latter cropping up again twenty years later when Barack Obama ran for president.45
Biden and Jackson had obliquely crossed swords before, being on opposite sides of the busing issue in the 1970s. Biden had had kind words for Jackson’s 1984 campaign anyway, telling reporters he could bring millions of unregistered black voters toward the party, particularly in the South.46
Now, however, Jackson was a threat, not just to Biden’s presidential ambitions but the direction he wanted to move the Democrats. “You can’t try to pit the Rainbow Coalition, blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, gays, against the middle class,” Biden said at the 1986 NAACP convention.47
He quickly distinguished himself as the only candidate willing to go after Jackson directly. At the same NAACP event, Biden urged the crowd to “reject the voices in the movement who tell black Americans to go it alone … and that only blacks should represent blacks,” a less-than-subtle dig at Jackson, who had recently campaigned for a black primary challenger in New Jersey over a white Democratic incumbent. “Ignore those voices … that simplistically reduce the public debate to a choice between rich and poor, disregarding the crisis of the middle class,” he told Louisiana Democrats, another dig at Jackson. Particularly controversial was his decision, four years after drawing cheers for saying he was “seeking the vice presidential nomination on the Jesse Jackson ticket,” to expressly rule out putting Jackson on a Joe Biden ticket. In the eyes of anti-Jackson Democrats, Biden was the only candidate with the “guts” to say what all the others were thinking. Meanwhile, Jackson gave as good as he got, traveling to Wilmington where he criticized “Democratic centrists … riding with the Kennedy credentials on the coattails of Reaganite reaction” and attacked deficit-cutters who were “combing their hair to the left like Kennedy and moving their policies to the right like Reagan.”48
Everyone knew who Jackson meant. Biden was running an expressly Kennedyesque campaign that leaned heavily on his youth, good looks, and charisma. Biden explained that he didn’t “think presidents get elected on specifics,” but rather “broader notions of what their vision for America is.” That message was cooked up by Pat Caddell. Failing to prod Biden into running for president in 1984, Caddell had simply transposed his Bidencentric strategy onto the similarly youthful and neoliberal Hart. A year later, Caddell helped craft what would come to be known as one of history’s worst marketing blunders: New Coke, which lasted 79 days before being pulled from the shelves.49
Caddell laid out his thinking on the coming election in a 92-page memo to IMPAC ’88, a group of millionaire party fundraisers devoted to pushing the Democratic Party to the right. Picking 1960 as the model for 1988 and Kennedy as the model for the right candidate, Caddell’s ideal nominee was an “inside insurgent” who would personify generational change without threatening the establishment, and hold conservative positions on issues like crime, abortion, the deficit, and the military. Caddell saw Baby Boomers—who would make up 58 percent of 1988 voters and were thought to be nonideological, nonpartisan, and antiestablishment—as key to any victory.
This became the ethos of the 1988 Biden campaign. “I can feel it in my fingers,” he said about the coming rise of the Boomer generation. “You can see the cultural manifestations. Somebody is going to be the political manifestation.” To that end, his stump speech served as a rolling travelogue of 1960s nostalgia, a self-consciously Kennedyesque paean heavy on vague but inspiring rhetoric about the possibilities of the future that frequently paid tribute to the former president and other slain ’60s liberal icons. “Just because our heroes were murdered doesn’t mean that the dream doesn’t lie buried deep within the hearts of tens of millions of us,” he told audiences in a version of the speech he had been giving for years. At the core of this was Biden’s misreading of history that Kennedy had “kindle[d] the bonfire that started the greatest generational movement in American politics since [Franklin] Roosevelt.” Nevertheless, delivered with Biden’s oratorical skill, speeches like these dazzled audiences around the country, though not all were sold.50
All the lofty talk of standing at the edge of a “fundamental watershed,” seeing “the breath of a new dawn” coming, and having “a unique chance to refashion the character and shape the future” didn’t mean an alternative political program, however.51
Biden continued to insist that the answers to US economic misfortune lay “beyond the reach of government” and criticized “the old Washington-based approach to economic policy.” America’s workplaces needed their own in-house daycare centers, he insisted, but not if the government mandated them; rather, the White House should make its own daycare center, because “if other chief executives see a president doing it, they will likely follow suit.” He promised to balance the budget by 1993, though without any tax hikes. Other big ideas were poached from his rivals, like having companies give workers 90 days’ notice when they closed plants. And he reminded the public about his conservative positions on busing and abortion.52
Biden didn’t entirely abandon the Democratic priorities of old, rolling out a plan to help the nation’s impoverished children. True to his philosophy, however, the plan was one-half government programs and one-half private volunteerism from corporations and the well-off. And even as he pledged worthy goals like letting poor kids under eleven get free health care, he promised less worthy ones, like making most anyone on welfare get jobs or join job training and educational programs. Others, like adding $1 to the minimum wage over four years, fell somewhere in the middle.53
As always, Biden had no trouble raising money. Over the course of just twenty-seven days in March, he raised a then–eye-popping $1.7 million, 70 percent more than any other candidate, and by July of that year, he would have $3.2 million, trailing only Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Much of this was on the back of his status as one of Israel’s “close friends” in Congress, with Israel lobbyists serving in various staff and fundraising roles for the campaign. Yet even with largely adoring press coverage, the money didn’t necessarily translate into overwhelming support: by the time he called it quits, he was polling at 10 percent in Iowa.54
Biden would have been at least a contender had his campaign not been engulfed by a quick succession of scandals in September. The first came when a Dukakis aide tipped the press off that passages in a Biden speech about his own family history were plagiarized from UK Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, who like Biden was trying to untether his party from its economically populist history. A few days later, the press revealed other passages had drawn, without attribution, on the past eloquence of Hubert Humphrey and Biden’s hero, Robert F. Kennedy. At the same time, it came out that Biden had failed a law class in 1965 after lifting five pages from a law review article for an assignment.55
Next to be exposed were Biden’s frequent allusions to his civil rights activism, a staple not just of his rose-tinted stump speech but often deployed during his fight to kill busing. During the campaign, he had talked about the time he and a group of classmates had gone to a local restaurant with the only black student in their class, only to leave when he was barred from eating there. The Philadelphia Inquirer tracked down Biden’s classmate, now working as
