Or should I say, running against the McCains.
When it comes to skeletons in the closet, the one that jumps out of Joe Biden's closet the fastest is his past bout with plagiarism. Back during his run for the 1988 presidency, an episode of plagiarism put him out of the running, as famousplagiarists.com reports.
"Senator Biden's plagiarism of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neal Kinnock took place at a campaign stump at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. In closing his speech, Biden took Kinnock's ideas and language as if they were his very own inspired thoughts, prefacing Kinnock's ideas with the phrase, "I started thinking as I was coming over here...." Little did Biden suspect that video footage of this speech would be spliced together with footage of Kinnock's speech in an "attack video" which would be distributed by members of the Dukakis campaign.
Making the headline news in the New York Times, and the evening news on TV, the video was a stab in the back for Biden by his democratic competitor, and although he insisted that "I'm in this race to stay. I'm in this race to win," the resulting publicity surrounding his unacknowledged use of Neal Kinnock's speech was what eventually forced him out of the race. Name recognition was no longer a problem for Biden, but not the kind of name recognition which would assist his campaign for the democratic presidential nomination.
That was not Biden's first case either. Apparently, he engaged in some plagiarism while attending Syracuse University Law School in 1965. He was flunked and had to re-take the course.
Now, the good news is that there is no way the McCain camp will be raising this as an issue. Cindy McCain has been caught at least twice plagiarizing recipes and John McCain has been accused of plagiarizing parts of his speech on the Georgia crisis-- with language very close to that found in Wikipedia. People magazine even titled an article, published two days ago, Biden v McCain, battle of the plagiarists.
I don't think so. The two of them will neutralize each other. McCain's problem is he and Cindy have no one to vet the less than competent people running the McCain campaign and both McCains let their campaign staff put things into their mouths a bit too easily.
No, the biggest risk the Obama Biden ticket faces will probably due to Biden being prone to logorrhea-- talking endlessly and on and on and continuing, perseverating, saying more than necessary about a point; replicating, odiously, boringly, to the point of nauseatingly, killing a subject; making droll, unnecessary remarks, that go on far and beyond, acres and miles beyond what is needed to be said in a concise, clear, short, brief, did I mention not necessarily long .... well, are you getting my drift? I fear that with an Obama-Biden Whitehouse, we will get daily radio talks from Biden-- maybe every few hours, and knowing Biden, they will merge into each other.
