* JOE BIDEN (23): The hearings for the Bork nomination to the Supreme Court were to begin on 15 September 1987. In the meantime, the complaints from the Right and the pressure from the Left intensified, with Right saying Joe was too prejudiced, the Left saying he wasn't prejudiced enough. There was a basis for believing the first accusation, less so for believing the second, Joe having said in an interview on C-SPAN:
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If I'm proven wrong -- if Bork is not part of the Reagan-Meese agenda on the court -- then in fact I would change my view. But I don't see any evidence of that at all ... the president has clearly decided on a political agenda for the court. He and Meese have made a judgement that they will pick someone who would vote the way they want on the court to fulfill their economic and social agenda ... The president has not been able to pass any of these things through the Congress.
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Joe took his case against Bork to the news media, while the Right bolstered their defense of Bork. Ronald Reagan himself gave a nationally-televised speech in August, calling Bork a "brilliant scholar" whose decisions had never been reversed by the Supreme Court, and would be "an important intellectual addition" to the bench.
* In the meantime, in the course of his primary campaigning, Joe Biden ended up creating a booby-trap for himself. It started when he obtained a videotape featuring British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock, out of coal-mining country, wondering why he and his wife were the first in their families to ever go to a university. Kinnock asked:
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Is it because all our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite, and write poetry, those people who could make wonderful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven child-bearings? Were they weak?
Anybody really think they didn't get what we have because they didn't have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand.
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Neil Kinnock's assertion that his coal-mining ancestors failed to better their lives because they lived in a system that didn't grant them opportunities resonated with Joe -- after all, he was the first Biden to go to college. As he wrote:
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It was so simple. That's what the Democratic Party should be doing for all its citizens, providing "a platform on which they could stand." People weren't asking for a free handout from government or a promise of fabulous outcomes. They just wanted a little support to help raise them higher.
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Joe started quoting Kinnock in his speeches at his campaign stops. On 23 August 1987, he did so in the primary debate at the Iowa State Fair. When the debate was over, one of his campaign staffers said to him: "You know you didn't mention Kinnock?" That was not a fatal mistake; there were plenty of reporters around, all Joe had to was get them together and issue a clarification. He didn't. [TO BE CONTINUED]
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