It never hurts to have a friend in the White House, does it? In what amounts to a love letter to Joe Biden, New York Times Supreme Court gal Linda Greenhouse tells us how the steel entered Joe Biden’s soul during the confirmation hearings for Judge—and not to be Justice—Robert Bork. Up until that time, Linda tells us, she generally accepted the accepted view of Joe “as an amiable lightweight, a showboat in love with the sound of his own voice.” But oh what a difference a confirmation hearing can make, huh?
Shortly before the hearing, Linda tells us, Biden’s “presidential candidacy imploded over what now seems like one of the sillier scandals of modern politics: his unattributed appropriation, at the end of a candidates’ debate at the Iowa State Fair, of a few catchy lines from a speech by a British politician.”
Really, Linda? Is that what happened? Back during the primary campaign, Matthew Yglesias gave a much fuller account of Uncle Joe’s truthiness problems, though you have to skip down to the heading “Joe Biden’s Neal Kinnock problem” to get past all the “primary talk”, which was, it seems, Matt’s major concern.
Anyway, here’s deal: Joe took some inspiring language from a speech by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock, sometimes crediting Neil but sometimes speaking as though Neil’s story was his story, and it wasn’t. Here, on one occasion, is what Joe said, all of it taken directly from Kinnock, with “Kinnock” replaced with “Biden”:
I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?
The thing is, Joe’s dad was a car salesman, and none of his ancestors had ever been coal miners. And, while he was the first “Biden” to go to college, several of his mother’s family had done so. To me, that’s a bit more than “a few catchy phrases.” Gee, the way things are at the Times, I hope Linda doesn’t lose her job over this.
Afterwords
In my brief and generally pathetic career as a free lancer, I actually met Judge Bork at some sort of “mixer”, and found him quite amiable—he was quite comfortable talking to a nobody like myself and never bothered to look over my shoulder for someone “important”—but also thoroughly absurd, expressing the thought that it “might” have been a good idea to ban Chuck Berry records back in the day, to prevent our nation’s catastrophic moral decline. A “libertarian” who wants to ban rock and roll? Thanks, but no thanks.
In an intriguing coincidence, my free lance career also brought me in contact with the individual who, more than Joe Biden or Teddy Kennedy, sank Bork’s nomination, Nan Aaron, a fellow Oberlin grad who headed the “Alliance for Justice”, aka “Judge Busters”, as she liked to call it. As I recall (the Internet has no details), Nan provided substance for liberal complaints about Bob by showing that, as a circuit judge for the Washington, DC Court of Appeals, he had often been overruled. Nan’s success led the Wall Street Journal to call her the “Madame LaFarge of liberal court-watchers”. Nan and Bob had offices a few blocks from each other, located within walking distance of my place. Bob had a wood-paneled office at the American Enterprise Institute on 17th St, while Nan sat behind a large metal desk, formerly the property of the U.S. Navy, crammed into a tiny office on Connecticut Ave, just off Dupont Circle.
