Biden Was Forced To Drop Out of Race Just Three Months After Entering

In June of 1987, Senator Joe Biden from Delaware announced that he would be running for President in 1988.

Senator Biden was considered one of the strongest candidates to win the Democratic nomination. Biden was a well-spoken moderate Democrat who appealed to Baby Boomers.

The Biden campaign for President started well as he raised millions of dollars in the earliest days of his campaign.

Senator Biden would pull out of the race for the nomination just three months later.

What happened?

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The wheels started to come off of the Biden campaign on September 12th, 1987.

This was when two articles - one in the New York Times and another in the Des Moines Register - made mention of the fact that Biden had not only "borrowed" liberally from a speech given by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party, but he had also "fabricated aspects of his own background in order to match Kinnock's."

As one example, the original Kinnock speech included these lines:

"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? 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?"

Here is what Biden said in a number of speeches that he gave in the summer of 1987:

"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?"

Biden would also go on to fabricate parts of his family's past that would turn out not to be true, in order to match the story of Neil Kinnock.

Biden had credited Kinnock for the story in the past but didn't make any mention during some key moments, including at a Democratic debate at the Iowa State Fair.

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As journalists started digging, they found multiple other instances where Biden had "borrowed" heavily from a famous speech.

On July 17th, 1988, Biden gave a speech in California which included lines that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had said, word for word, at the University of Kansas on March 18th, 1968.

During his initial address to the world after announcing his candidacy on June 9th, 1987, Biden gave a speech which included a number of lines from President John F. Kennedy's inauguration speech in 1961.

Newspapers also reported that Biden had given speeches in 1985 and 1986 that had included an entire passage from a 1976 speech given by Hubert H. Humphrey.

Biden furiously tried to maintain his innocence, saying that he had paraphrased Kinnock's speech before and had always given him credit, but forgot to do so one time at the Iowa State Fair.

Journalists were sinking their teeth into the story, unearthing more evidence of Biden's liberal "borrowing" of "familiar phrases" from other speeches.

News networks also discovered that Biden had failed a course during his first year of law school at the Syracuse University School of Law. Biden had been accused of plagiarism and was given an F. He was announced to re-take the course and ended up passing.

Biden had also maintained that he had graduated in the "top half" of his class, had earned a full scholarship and had received three degrees in college. These were all lies - in fact, Biden had finished 76th out of 85 people in his law class.

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Biden's campaign, which had started out with so much promise, was now a running joke.

In September of 1987, Biden would drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President.

The situation didn't hurt his political career - in fact, he easily held on to his Senate seat in 1990. Biden would run again for President in 2008, eventually bowing out after agreeing to become Barack Obama's running mate.

Biden eventually rose to the nation’s highest office, becoming the 46th President of the United States in 2021.

Filed under: General Knowledge