page_title: Joe Biden
section_title: 1988 presidential campaign
hierarchical_section_title: Joe Biden / United States Senate (1973–2009) / 1988 presidential campaign
caption_attribution_description: English: Joe Biden in 1987 at White House.
context_page_description: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is an American politician who served as the 47th vice president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He served as a United States Senator for Delaware from 1973 to 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2020 election, running against the incumbent, Donald Trump. Biden unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008.
  Biden was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle County, Delaware. He studied at the University of Delaware before receiving his law degree from Syracuse University. He became a lawyer in 1969 and was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972, becoming the sixth-youngest senator in American history. Biden was a longtime member and eventually chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991 but supported the expansion of the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe and its intervention in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. He supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007.
context_section_description: Biden ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, formally declaring his candidacy at the Wilmington train station on June 9, 1987. He was attempting to become the youngest president since John F. Kennedy. When the campaign began, he was considered a potentially strong candidate because of his moderate image, his speaking ability on the stump, his appeal to Baby Boomers, his high-profile position as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the upcoming Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings, and his fundraising appeal. He raised $1.7 million in the first quarter of 1987, more than any other candidate.
  By August 1987, Biden's campaign, whose messaging was confused due to staff rivalries, had begun to lag behind those of Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt, though he had still raised more funds than any candidate but Dukakis and was seeing an upturn in Iowa polls. In September 1987, the campaign ran into trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech that had been made earlier that year by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock's speech included the lines:
  Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? [Then 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?
  While Biden's speech included the lines:
  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? [Then 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 had in fact cited Kinnock as the source for the formulation on previous occasions, but he made no reference to the original source at the August 23 Democratic debate at the Iowa State Fair being reported on or in an August 26 interview with the National Education Association. Moreover, while political speeches often appropriate ideas and language from each other, Biden's use came under more scrutiny because he changed aspects of his own family's background to match Kinnock's. Biden was soon found to have lifted passages from a 1967 speech by Robert F. Kennedy earlier that year (for which his aides took the blame) and a short phrase from the 1961 inaugural address of John F. Kennedy and to have done the same with a 1976 passage from Hubert H. Humphrey two years earlier.
  A few days later, Biden's plagiarism incident in law school came to public light. Video was also released showing that when earlier questioned by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school, he had said he graduated in the "top half" of his class, that he had attended law school on a full scholarship, and that he had received three degrees in college, each of which was untrue or an exaggeration. Advisers and reporters pointed out his false claim to have marched in the civil rights movement.
  The limited amount of other news about the race amplified these revelations, when most of the public was not yet paying attention to the campaigns. Biden thus fell into what The Washington Post writer Paul Taylor called that year's trend, a "trial by media ordeal". Lacking a strong group of supporters to help him survive the crisis, he withdrew from the race on September 23, 1987, saying his candidacy had been overrun by "the exaggerated shadow" of his past mistakes.
  After Biden withdrew, it was revealed that the Dukakis campaign had secretly made a video highlighting the Biden–Kinnock comparison and distributed it to news outlets. Later in 1987, the Delaware Supreme Court's Board of Professional Responsibility cleared Biden of the law school plagiarism charges regarding his standing as a lawyer, saying Biden had "not violated any rules".
caption: Biden in 1987
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