I’ve long enjoyed reading the Washington Post’s Chris Cilliza. His blog (“The Fix“) is a daily stop, and I find him to be fair, thoughtful, and always interesting. That’s why I did a bit of a double-take when he launched his report on Joe Biden’s appearance on the Colbert’s The Late Show with this:
Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics. (Emphasis mine.)
Later, he says this:
The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.
It’s also someone who would drive a striking contrast with Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Where Clinton is struggling with the perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, Biden is all honesty. Where Clinton is cautious and closed off, Biden is spontaneous and an open book. (Emphasis mine.)
I’ll grant that Biden is spontaneous, but honest? Let’s not forget what derailed Joe Biden from being one of the “front-runners” for the 1988 Democratic nomination — “unusually creepy” plagiarism, essentially appropriating the life story of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Here’s Slate’s David Greenberg, telling the story in 2008:
What is certain is that Biden didn’t simply borrow the sort of boilerplate that counts as common currency in political discourse—phrases like “fighting for working families.” What he borrowed was Kinnock’s life.
Biden lifted Kinnock’s precise turns of phrase and his sequences of ideas—a degree of plagiarism that would qualify any student for failure, if not expulsion from school. But the even greater sin was to borrow biographical facts from Kinnock that, although true about Kinnock, didn’t apply to Biden. Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn’t the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock’s words. Once exposed, Biden’s campaign team managed to come up with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate’s description of one who “would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football.” At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life.
This is bizarre enough, of course. But the story gets worse:
Unfortunately for Biden, more revelations of plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. (In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his speech without Biden’s knowledge; in another account, the failure to credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper that he submitted. He admitted as well that he had falsely stated that British Labor official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape. (Healey had denied the claim.) And Biden conceded that he had exaggerated in another matter by stating in a speech some years earlier that he had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters, and was thus actively involved in the civil rights movement. He protested, his press secretary clarified, “to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater.” The latter two of these fibs were small potatoes by any reckoning, but in the context of other acts of dishonesty, they helped to form a bigger picture.
This is dishonesty, pure and simple, going back all the way to law school. Then, under pressure, he just kept lying:
While lashing out at the audience member, Biden defended his academic credentials by inflating them, in a fashion that was notably unbecoming and petty for a presidential candidate.
“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden sniped at the voter. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship.” That claim was false, as was another claim, made in the same rant, that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. Biden wrongly stated, too, that he had earned three undergraduate degrees, when in fact he had earned one—a double major in history and political science. Another round of press inquiries followed, and Biden finally withdrew from the race on Sept. 23.
The sheer number and extent of Biden’s fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least.
So, no, Joe Biden has not “always” been honest. In fact, the first time he ran for president, he was deeply, repeatedly, and emphatically dishonest.
For many in Washington, Biden is a beloved figure, viewed by some as one of the last “authentic” men in national politics. Moreover, he has suffered immense loss, and he has borne that unimaginable grief with a public dignity that is inspiring to behold. He would be a formidable challenger to Hillary Clinton. But it is certainly possible to appreciate his public virtues and his political skills without rewriting his political history.