{UAH} JOE BIDEN IN HIS PRIME

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.

"I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do," he shouted at one questioner during a town hall-style event. "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class." It wasn't even true. Biden ranked 80th of 100 students in his first year of law school and 76th of 85 in the last. In his first year, he failed one class and was forced to repeat it. He included in a paper he claimed was his own five pages from a law school review without attribution.

Biden also claimed he had been named "the outstanding political science student ... at the University of Delaware" and that he had graduated with three undergraduate degrees. The three degrees were actually one degree with one double major, and the "full academic scholarship" was half need-based, not merit-based.

These judgments were made by liberal writers for liberal publications, who probably liked Biden and his positions but found these hysterics a little too much.

Biden himself seems a nice enough human being, open and caring to people in trouble (of which he’s seen plenty) but, at the same time, a fabulist and a narcissist with much too high an estimation of his self-worth and talent.

The knock on Biden, as he slowly fades out of his third and last run for president, is that he’s "lost a few steps" from the 1988 and 2008 campaigns and that he is not quite what he was in his prime. But, the sad fact is that there wasn't much to be proud of in those earlier races, and he seems never to have had a real prime to speak of.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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