Joe Biden, Neil Kinnock, and Presidential Plagiarism
Joe Biden will leave the White House at the end of the year — but in the late 1980s scandal rocked an earlier attempt to become President
American politics is rarely dull, with the last sixty years in particular lined with colourful characters and scandals. The 1960s was perhaps the liveliest decade, with the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the moon landing, and the Vietnam War dominating headlines.
Yet the later years were hardly quiet, and the 1988 Presidential Election saw a soon-to-be departing White House resident left red-faced. In June 1987, at a train station in Wilmington, Democrat Joe Biden officially declared his candidacy for the Presidential race. It was a first attempt at becoming President for the then 44-year-old, but it was over very soon after it began.
The 1980s was a decade of high alert for the USA. Jimmy Carter departed the White House and Republican Ronald Reagan moved in, serving two terms through a period that included the Chernobyl Disaster, the intensification of the Cold War, and the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. 1988 would see a new President voted in to take the USA into the 1990s, and Joe Biden wanted to be that man.
The Presidential dream was one Biden kept alive for years, and as early as 1984 he was tipped to be a Democratic candidate. Following his announcement for candidacy in 1987, Biden was outlined as one of the stronger hopefuls. However this hope wasn’t reflected in the primaries and his performance in the first in Houston, Texas in July received a mixed bag of responses.
Richard Gephardt and Michael Dukakis were Biden’s main rivals for the Democratic ticket in the election, and by August 1987 both were ahead of his. The following month, on September 12, stories were ran in the New York Times and other large publications about a controversy that would bring Joe Biden’s campaign to a grinding halt.
The reports were damning and suggested that Biden had used extracts of a speech made by the Labour Party leader at the Welsh Labour Party Conference in 1985 in his own. The most prominent of these was below:
“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? [Pointing to his wife in the audience:] Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?
Biden’s version then included the lines below:
“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? [Pointing to his wife in the audience:] 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?”
Biden used these lines in a speech at the Iowa State Fair, and he used further versions of the same Kinnock speech throughout. The irony is in other speeches Biden accredited Kinnock when using lines, but not in the Iowa speech which was the subject of the reports.
Other controversies had come to light over this period including one involving him lying about his academic achievements. Another was Biden suggesting he was a civil rights marcher, which was also found out to be untrue. These issues meant that on September 23, although reaffirming his determination to stay in the race just six days earlier, Biden withdrew.
Michael Dukakis was selected to run as the Democrat candidate against Republican George H.W. Bush- an election which Bush won by a landslide. This showed that despite the issues people had with Reagan and the Republican party, they weren't quite ready to back the Democrats again.
Biden ran for the Democratic candidacy again in 2008, but this was a race Barack Obama won. Biden was however selected to be Obama’s running mate and spent eight years as Vice President. He would have to wait another 12 years to finally get voted into the top seat in American politics and some would say the world.
You might be wondering if there was any bad blood between Kinnock and Biden after the plagiarised speech. The answer to that is no, and Biden even once introduced Kinnock as ‘his best speech writer’ which in the red-hot arena of politics made for a good-hearted quip.
