march of civil rights in order to stay in power.81
Biden’s zealous turnabout on busing presaged the anti-crime and anti-drug crusades he embarked on in subsequent decades for similar reasons of political survival. These, too, were issues abstracted from, but deeply tied up with, America’s long struggle over racial equality, ones that greatly worried the suburban, middle-class, white voters whose opinion preoccupied Biden. This was a pattern for the rest of his career: whenever a right-wing hysteria would grip the public, Biden would be swept up in the frenzy, going further than even some of his conservative colleagues, typically to the detriment of the most vulnerable. For now, however, it was just one part of Biden’s transformation.
Year of the Conservative
Looking back in 1981, Biden said he had been persuaded to evolve by his fellow lawmakers.
“I have been made a believer over the last nine years in the Senate,” he said. The teachings of economists, he continued, had made him reluctant to listen to his Republican colleagues about the dangers of deficit spending, particularly when he was just an impressionable 29-year-old “not too long out of college.” But eventually he was worn down. “As I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets,” he said.
In truth, there was more to it than this. Biden had always chafed against being labeled a liberal. Perhaps it was something in the distinct character of Delaware, a slave state that stayed with the Union in the Civil War, literally and figuratively straddling the Mason-Dixon line. “Given a choice of Philadelphia or Virginia, I suspect a majority of Delaware would go South,” Biden once joked at a meeting of regional movers and shakers, earning a stern rebuke from a local columnist, which wouldn’t keep Biden from recycling the comment in later years.82
He spoke with pride about political hacks’ inability to put him in a box. In a 1977 interview, Biden explained that his “lack of orthodoxy” bamboozled older generations who still thought “you’re either a New Deal Democrat or you’re a traditional conservative Republican.” A memo from Pat Caddell—Biden’s friend and pollster who had moved on from helping him enter the Senate to helping Jimmy Carter enter the White House—had just been unearthed, warning Carter that “young Turks” like Biden could be his undoing. Caddell saw Biden as “part of a new generation of leadership that has some significantly different views than the basic Republican and Democratic philosophies that are prevalent today,” Biden reported after a conversation between the two.83
The irony was that Biden had been the very first senator to endorse Carter’s insurgent run. Long before Carter had announced, Biden had been advising party apparatchiks to give the cold shoulder to old-guard liberals like Hubert Humphrey and look instead to “Southern governors,” a preview of the conservative strategy the party would adopt in the Reagan years. When Carter made clear he was seeking the Democratic nomination, Biden gave his backing and swiftly became the chairman of his campaign’s steering committee.84
Carter was just the kind of unorthodox Democrat Biden aspired to be: socially conservative but enlightened on race and waging a fight against the corroded culture of Washington with the help of a small circle of hometown advisors. Biden likely saw much of his own 1972 run in Carter’s unlikely bid. The perennial outsider even after winning, Carter waged a lonely, unpopular war on government spending and fought the ongoing economic decline that defined his administration partly through deregulation of trucking, airlines, banking, and other industries.
Even so, Biden’s habit of spouting deliberately, some would say obnoxiously, contrarian talking points sometimes made an awkward fit for the role of campaign surrogate. Biden criticized the Carter campaign to reporters and at one point told the Associated Press at an Iowa rally that independent candidate Eugene McCarthy “would be the best qualified” for president. Carter would later lose Iowa by the barest of margins, partly because McCarthy got 2 percent of the vote.85
That Carter, the Democrat, became the country’s first neoliberal president anticipated where US political culture would swerve in the coming decade. It also mirrored Biden’s own evolution away from the New Deal tradition. As early as 1974, Biden had started to describe himself as a social liberal who was conservative fiscally, a subtle change to his earlier self-classifications. Two years later, he rapped Humphrey for not being “cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems” and lacking “the intestinal fortitude to look at some programs and say ‘no.’”86 His 1978 reelection campaign would push him more completely in this direction.
Biden’s chances looked good. With polls suggesting he would be a tough opponent, his most formidable potential rival, former House Rep. Pierre “Pete” du Pont, had instead run for and won the governor’s office. The current House Rep. Thomas Evans declined for the same reason. The state’s GOP was left with two options: the ultraconservative anti-busing activist Jim Venema, who had vowed to take Biden’s seat after his pro-busing vote on the Gurney amendment, or some less embarrassing Republican to stop Venema from taking the nomination. The party ended up going with James Baxter, a Sussex County farmer who, despite Venema’s grassroots support and dominance in small-dollar donations, became the nominee by just under 2,000 votes in a low-turnout primary.87
Biden had already covered his right flank on social policy. “I don’t know how in God’s name Jim Venema is going to be able to paint Joe Biden as a pro-buser,” he remarked. He bristled at suggestions he’d been pushed to where he now stood. “Venema’s full of crap,” he said. “I am not a political charlatan who does not operate out of principle.” Now he started the same covering maneuver on economics, introducing in 1977 an even more stringent version of William Roth’s “sunset” bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically cease to exist—what he termed “spending control legislation.” (The final compromise bill stretched this to ten years). Casting one of twenty-one votes against a bill to keep Social Security solvent, Biden complained that the bill put “a disproportionate burden on the middle-income folks.”88
The election took place in the shadow of the “taxpayers’ revolt” of 1978, one which had been rumbling before then. As inflation squeezed the wages of middle- and upper-middle-class earners—caught between incomes that rose to keep up with inflation and tax brackets that stayed the same and already leery of redistributive programs that seemed to mostly help other people—property owners around the country seethed. In California, Ronald Reagan’s home state and ground zero for the revolt, popular anger helped pass Proposition 13, which put severe limits on the state government’s taxation powers.89
In the long term, Prop 13 would create a fiscal crisis in the state and ravage its public services and institutions. In the short term, it lit a fire under middle-class homeowners across the country, producing imitators in state after state. Less than three years after its passage, eighteen states had placed limits on taxes and/or government spending, including Michigan’s 1978 Headlee Amendment to the state constitution.90
“1978 has turned out to be the year of the conservative,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News. Biden, who a year earlier had confidently predicted no one “more conservative than Bill Roth” could win statewide in Delaware, now fretted about the upcoming election in interviews and snapped at questions about where exactly he sat on the political spectrum. “What kind of question is that?” he told a reporter. “Are you still beating your wife?”91
The federal tax cut introduced by Roth and New York Congressman Jack Kemp was a child of this taxpayer revolt: a measure that would have slashed personal tax rates by 33 percent and corporate rates by 6 percent. At Baxter’s urging, Biden—now insisting that “on fiscal matters I’m a conservative” and making a cap on government spending the crux of his pitch to voters—became
