Bum Rap—Joe Biden and the Neil Kinnock speech
Last edited Wed Sep 26, 2012, 11:54 AM - Edit history (1)
This isn't apropos of anything, but it's always good to remember the truth beneath the popular mythology.
Everyone knows that Joe Biden was drummed out of the 1988 primaries for passing off a Neil Kinnock speech as his own life story. (He credits being forced out of the race as having saved his life—a check-up he had been putting off while busy campaigning discovered a serious brain aneurysm.)
What I think is less well known is that Joe Biden never actually tried to pass off Neil Kinnock's reminiscences as his own words, let alone his own life story. The extended quote from the Kinnock speech was part of Biden's stump speech. He delivered it time and again, prefaced with saying that he wanted to quote this really awesome thing from a Neil Kinnock speech that reminded him of his own upbringing.
(I only learned this in 2008 from a TV documentary about Biden's career made after Obama picked him for VP.)
One day he forgot the attribution (Biden is guilty then, as now, of being kind of free-style when he gets rolling), and a creature named Maureen Dowd happened to be in the audience as a reporter. And Ms. Dowd recognized the Kinnock speech and thought that her brilliant recall had blown open the story of the year.
At the time, Ms. Dowd was a working journalist (she's an op-ed writer today) who got the overblown story on the front page of the New York Times under her byline without noting that the same 'plagarized' material had been delivered, attributed by Biden to Neil Kinnock, many times in the preceding days and weeks.
There was really no story there. But Biden decided the contrition route was best, so he went way overboard in apologizing, which made it sound like he was apologizing for something serious.
So why was he forced out of the race? Because it was 1988. There wasn't 24-hour political news, or the internet, or cable news. (The 1991 Iraq War was what first made CNN a big deal.) Not everything was videotaped. Not everybody knew everything about everything.
So if you were a long-shot primary candidate and there was a front page story in the NYT saying you were a plagiarist and liar and perhaps delusional that was pretty much it.
Today Biden's team would have quickly released a video reel of him attributing the quote over and over in other speeches and it would have blown over.
(For comparison, consider that Ronald Reagan, who was president in 1988, routinely did things like claiming incidents as part of his personal biography that were things that had actually happened to characters he played in movies.)
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