JOE, MO, BOBBY, AND ME: THE FORGOTTEN BIDEN PLAGIARISM EPISODE

[Geee]

American Spectator:

From 2008 -- and 1987! -- this piece ran under the headline and subhead: "Joe, Mo, Bobby, and Me: Values issues and Joe Biden's speeches when I helped sink his first campaign." Read it here first, before Hillary has it released.

 

It is an unlikely and I certainly thought long forgotten tale.

 

The time: September, 1987.

 

The characters in this story: Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd, the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy -- and me.

 

To begin, Biden. The then young Senator from Delaware, a rising star for the Democrats since his election to the Senate in 1972 at the age of thirty, was very much in the news that September. First, he was a popular and viable candidate for his party's 1988 presidential nomination. The field that year included such as 1984 nomination runner-up Gary Hart, Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Tennessee Senator Al Gore and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The campaign had been on in earnest for months, and the very eloquent young Senator Biden was in fact getting traction with his oratorical skills.

 

Biden was also getting a significant boost from the fact that President Reagan had decided to nominate Judge Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court. The Senator was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the hearings, now legend for their brutal treatment of Bork that began from the moment Reagan made the appointment, were ready to begin with Biden holding the gavel.

 

Darting back and forth between Washington and the campaign trail, Biden was decidedly in the public eye. Unfortunately, as with all presidential candidates, he had rivals who were unhappy about both his prominence and his success with primary audiences. An aide to Massachusetts Governor Dukakis had also noticed something about Biden's rhetoric. One speech in particular had been plagiarized straight from the then leader of the British Labour Party, the Right Honorable Neil Kinnock. The Dukakis aide had a video of Kinnock, and one of Biden repeating the same speech, changing only the locale to make a Welsh coal miner into a Scranton coal miner. Leaked anonymously, the good ship Biden was barely scraped with this political shot across the bow. Biden said it was an accident that he had not made attribution to Kinnock, and for the moment, the story faded.

[Valin]