by Jeff Wilser
But these principles don’t go far without campaign donations, and Biden had squat. In the early days he met with potential donors; many passed. (Why squander money on a lost cause?) In one of these meetings, a potential donor told him that he had no chance, that the experts said he had no chance and even his dentist said he had no chance. He just ripped into Biden.
Joe stood up and turned to leave. “Look, I don’t have to take this malarkey. I don’t need you or this committee. And another thing…I’m gonna win.”
MALARKEY
“Malarkey” is the most Biden-y word in the English language. But where does it come from?
The word’s origin can be traced back to the early thirteenth century, when an old Irish shoemaker, Bartley Malarkey, was accused of cheating his customers.
Wait…that’s a bunch of malarkey. The origin is unknown. Merriam-Webster defines it as “insincere or foolish talk.” The earliest use is thought to be in the 1920s, possibly from an Irish-American cartoon. UrbanDictionary.com defines it as “an Irish-American slang word meaning ‘bullshit.’ Most notably used by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during the 2012 Vice Presidential debate.” (Another win for Biden: his very own Urban Dictionary entry.) You get the feeling that this is a word that Joe heard while growing up in the Biden clan, a word that helped shape his thoughts on integrity, plainspokenness, and what it means to be a man.
One study analyzed a century’s worth of public records and found that Biden used the word “malarkey” more than twice as much as anyone in Congress. A few classics:
In 2012, Biden told a group of Pennsylvania firefighters that President Obama was going to invite them to the White House for a beer. “He’s going to call you, no bullshit. This is no malarkey. You come to the White House. I’ll buy you a beer.”
In 2015, Biden said, “Mark my words, the Republican Party is going to try to claim credit for this [economic] resurgence….It’s a bunch of malarkey.”
In 2016, Biden said that Donald Trump “is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break. That’s a bunch of malarkey.”
From Day 1 of the campaign, Biden made one thing clear: No gutter politics. No attacks on personality. This conviction would become a career-long habit, and it’s one reason he’s so beloved in the Senate, by Democrats and Republicans alike. He even took the “positive campaign” to hilarious extremes. At every turn he seemed to praise Caleb Boggs. “I don’t think [anybody] can find anything unethical about Senator Boggs,” he volunteered cheerfully. “He’s just a very ethical guy.”
Biden’s one flirtation with negativity? He said that Boggs was “a nice guy, but he’s just not an innovative senator.” Burn.
And let’s say you were a Cale Boggs supporter and you happened to awkwardly bump into Joe Biden on the street. If he talked to you—and of course he would talk to you—he just might open his blazer and show you a campaign button that read I LOVE CALE. This actually happened. Biden actually wore a Boggs campaign label inside his suit jacket.
Given that mind-set, there was no way he would allow his team to run a negative ad. “We produced some radio advertising in which we just really mildly criticized Caleb Boggs, and after it ran for two or three days, he made us take it off the air,” remembers John Marttila, a longtime advisor, who helped create the ’72 ads. He laughs when he tells the story. “I think one of them was on the environment, and the tagline was something like, ‘When Joe Biden sees a tree, he sees a tree,’ and it was so gentle by today’s standards. But Joe was always, always adamant about a lack of negative advertising.” So they pulled the incendiary ad.
WISDOM OF JOE
Never neg.
Instead of going after Boggs, he used the Vietnam War as a wedge issue, denouncing it as a “stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives based on a flawed premise,” and wondering why the United States was “spending so much energy in Southeast Asia that we had left truly vital interests unattended.” (Swap out “Southeast Asia” with “Middle East,” and it’s easy to spot a coherent through-line from 1972 to the present.)
Yet even if he was good on the issues, the age thing was a real problem. Who runs for the Senate at age twenty-nine? He looked so young that when he campaigned with his father (alongside Neilia and his mom), people sometimes mistook Joe Sr. for the Senate candidate. (“Hey, I’m going to vote for your dad!” people would tell Joe. He’d fire back, “I am, too!”)
Val found a solution when staring at a portrait of Henry Clay, the legendary senator. Clay was twenty-nine when appointed to the Senate in 1806. (Biden’s birthday, conveniently, would fall between the election and the start of the next Senate term, so he just barely made the cut.) Suddenly Joe had an easy answer. When people told him he was too young to be a senator, now he could say with a straight face, “You know, not since Henry Clay has anybody my age joined the Senate.”
At every turn he would hobnob with voters. Buying milk in the grocery store? He’d talk to voters. Traveling in a car? He’d talk to voters. When driving through town, he and Neilia had a system: She’d drive, he’d ride shotgun, and then, at red lights, he’d hop out to shake the hands of random drivers. By the time the light turned green, Joe was back in the car.
One night, the governor of Pennsylvania, who was Jewish, offered to campaign for Joe in a largely Jewish community. The campaign event was at a hotel reception hall, but the room was nearly empty. Huh. Where is everyone? They realized that much of the absent crowd must be at a nearby wedding. “Let’s go,” they said, and the boys embraced their inner Wedding Crashers and charmed the crowd. (Months later, Biden would win the Jewish vote.)
“He was the Energizer Bunny,” a volunteer later told Biden’s biographer, Jules Witcover. “He’d never stop. If you went to a high school football game on a Saturday morning, he was there. If you went to the Acme, he was there. If you went to the Delaware football game in the afternoon, he was there. He would go to those polka dances in the old Polish section of town. He’d shake hands. He had that smile, that grin.” It’s a national tragedy that we do not have video footage of twenty-nine-year-old Joe Biden at the Polish polka dances.
As Biden began to generate heat in Delaware, in DC, a man named F. Nordy Hoffman looked at the slate of 1972 Democratic hopefuls. It was Hoffman’s job to get Democratic senators elected. As the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he helped the party figure out how to divvy up its resources—who to fund, who to snub. Before he gave anyone a nickel, he wanted to size them up.
One day he invited Joe and his brother Jimmy, who ran the campaign’s finances, to his office. Joe told Hoffman that he was going to run for the U.S. Senate.
“I knew a lot about this young man, but I wanted to find out if he had guts,” Hoffman remembered years later. “So I really taunted him for the first fifteen minutes: ‘What makes you think you can run?’ ‘Why should you be chosen?’ ‘We don’t have all the money in the world, and I’m sure you don’t have it.’”
Finally, Biden looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t have to take this crap from you.”
Bingo. “We are going to go for you. That’s what I wanted to know,” Hoffman told him.
“What?” Biden asked.
“I wanted to see if you had any guts,” Hoffman said.
“That was Joe Biden. He came through with flying colors,” Hoffman explained. “He was going to tell me he wouldn’t take my money and the hell with me.”
JOE THE LIFEGUARD
Ever since his first election, Biden has been a vocal champion of civil rights. His inspiration? The swimming pool.
In 1962, while still in college, Joe made some extra cash as a lifeguard. (With his swim trunks and summer tan, it must be said, this is peak Hot Young Biden.) A dozen lifeguards worked at the Prices Run swimming pool, but he was the only white guy. He was one of the only white people in the entire pool, which was filled with hundreds of African American swimmers.
Biden played hoops with the o
ther lifeguards. Made friends. And for perhaps the first time, he began to see the world through a different, less privileged, set of eyes. He heard stories of segregation at movie theaters, of naked racism, of how black people endured “a dozen small cuts a day.”
He got along well with the community. Well, most of the community. There was one exception. The pool did have its share of what Biden called “gangs,” including a group known as the Romans. And the Romans had a kid named “Corn Pop.” One day Corn Pop kept bouncing on a diving board, which was against pool policy.
As Biden later told the story in Promises to Keep, he yelled at Corn Pop to stop the bouncing.
Corn Pop kept bouncing.
Biden whistled again.
“Hey, Esther! Esther Williams!” Biden yelled, referring to the ’50s swimmer and actress, and making one of his first Dad jokes. “Get off the board, man. You’re out of here.” Corn Pop left the pool.
Just one problem. The other guards, who knew better, warned him that later that day, when Biden left the pool and went to his car, Corn Pop might attack him with a straight razor. Shit. Biden thought about calling the police, but was then advised that if he did that, he’d never be accepted into the community. Double shit. So he did what any sensible nineteen-year-old would do: He wrapped his arm in a six-foot length of chain.
Biden left the pool and went to his car.
Corn Pop was waiting.
Biden held up his arm. He brandished the chain he had brought, and threatened to “wrap this chain around your head” before Corn Pop could use his razor. But then he kept talking, motormouth-Biden-style, and loud enough that the whole pool could hear him. Foreshadowing his days on the Senate floor, he launched into a mini speech about how he shouldn’t have called him Esther Williams, he meant no disrespect, and he apologized, although—he quickly added—it really is wrong to bounce on the diving board and Corn Pop shouldn’t do it again, and on and on and on…
It’s unclear if Corn Pop was amused, befuddled, or simply fell asleep during the surprising speech, but somehow the bomb was defused. No knives, no cuts, no chain-wrapping. Corn Pop and Joe even became unlikely buddies, and now the Romans had his back.
More than fifty years later, as an old man, Joe returned to that swimming pool. Wearing a navy suit instead of swim trunks, he sat in the lifeguard chair. “I owe you all,” he told the crowd. “I owe this neighborhood. I learned so, so much.” And by then the pool had a new name: The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center.
As the election approached, Biden still trailed in the polls by over 30 points. How could he break through? How could he mix it up? Biden had an idea for a radio ad that was, well, a tad unconventional.
In the ad, Biden approached random people at a grocery store and said, basically, “My name is Joe Biden. I’m the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Do you trust me?”
The shoppers would say, “No, why should I trust you?”
It seemed as if Biden was recording his very own attack ad. His team was skeptical. “You can’t put an ad on the air having people testify they don’t trust you!” Marttila pleaded. But Joe stuck to his guns. He sensed that a lack of trust in the system permeated the air, and he wanted to be an antidote. He flipped the message to say, “That’s what’s wrong with America right now. I promise you if you elect me, you’ll know exactly where I stand. You’ll be able to trust me.”
The ad was as shoestring as it gets. “Our radio ad was a guy on our staff with a portable tape recorder, putting the microphone in the face of our mailman,” Val later told NPR.
Joe’s bizarro ad was joined by a series of brochures, and even though his campaign ran on fumes, the literature was slick. “Joe Biden is making an impact on the U.S. Senate and he hasn’t even been elected yet,” said the front page of one brochure, and then, inside, it showed photos of Biden next to veteran senators like Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, with a goal of boosting his gravitas. It worked. “The printed material became kind of a revolution for political print, and was duplicated afterwards,” says Marttila. (In 2015, lifelong pundit Chris Matthews remembered these brochures as something that he had “never seen before or since…He looked like he belonged there [in the Senate]; in fact, like he was already there.”)
Yet as wonderful as these brochures might be, they were useless if no one read them. And Biden couldn’t afford the postage. Mailing a single round of brochures cost $36,000, which would shatter their meager budget. The solution? Val created the “Biden post office,” a base of thousands of freckled teenagers who would hand-deliver these brochures across Delaware. The kids schlepped across the state on Saturdays and Sundays, when they were off from school.
Biden was big with the kids. Even though most of them weren’t old enough to vote, he visited high schools and spoke to the students. Biden had a hunch that even though the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds couldn’t cast a ballot, if they got excited enough, they could maybe convince their mom and dad to vote. You could argue that in 1972, Biden was to Delaware teenagers what Obama was to college kids in 2007—short on experience, long on hope.
Biden could feel the momentum. He was closing the gap. And best of all, Caleb Boggs hadn’t really done much campaigning, as he viewed his reelection as a fait accompli.
Finally it was time for debate night. The two men went back and forth congenially and respectfully, sticking to the issues. (Unlike 2016, no one threatened to throw the other in jail.) At the very end, Boggs was asked about his thoughts on the Genocide Treaty, something of a hot-button issue at the time. It was a simple question.
Yet Boggs couldn’t handle it, fumbled, and said he was “unfamiliar” with the treaty. (Today, within seconds of Boggs’s goof, we would pillory him on Twitter: #UnfamiliarwiththeTreaty.)
The moderator turned the question over to Joe.
Biden had thoughts on the treaty. How could he not? All of those spaghetti dinners with the PhDs and the Rhodes Scholars had paid off, and he was surprised to see Boggs wobbling. He could pounce. He could go for the kill.
Instead he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is, either.”
Years later he explained that if he had pressed the point it would have been “graceless,” or like “clubbing the family’s favorite uncle.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Know when to pull a punch.
Young Biden kept it classy, he kept meeting voters, and the polls kept tightening.
Suddenly the impossible seemed very possible. The Boggs people began to sniff trouble. They started running attack ads, such as a brochure that showed a kitchen sink with the tagline “This is the only thing that Joe Biden hasn’t promised you.”
Yet as Team Biden neared the finish line, they were running out of money. Now the race seemed like a true toss-up. And they needed to keep their radio ads on the air. If they lost the ads, they’d lose the election. But, with ten days to go until election day, the coffers were empty.
So Val arranged a meeting with some fat-cat investment counselors. They were ready to give.
In a private meeting, they asked Biden what he thought about lowering the capital gains rate. “I knew the answer I thought they wanted to hear,” Biden remembered. “All I had to say was that I’d consider it…and I couldn’t say it….I just couldn’t lie to their faces.” He told them he wasn’t for changing capital gains.
The meeting ended. On the way home, Brother Jimmy told him, “Joe, I sure in hell hope you feel that strongly about capital gains because you just lost the election.”
Biden didn’t look back. Instead, he took out a second mortgage on his home. The ads stayed up.
Finally, election night.
112,844 people voted for the Republican icon Caleb Boggs.
116,006 voted for Joe Biden.
He won by just 3,162 votes, roughly 1 percent of the total—or about ten sessions of coffee. That night, Boggs called him to concede.
“You ran a good race, Joe.”
Biden was ove
rwhelmed. He held the phone in his hand, choked up, and for once, he could barely speak. “I’m sorry, Senator. I’m sorry,” Biden finally let out.
The Biden team held a victory party at the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont. Kaufman still remembers the euphoria in that ballroom. “I can remember just as distinctly as if it just happened. I thought to myself, ‘I will never, ever believe anything is impossible again.’…I’ve seen a lot of campaigns, I’ve been in a lot of campaigns, and I have heard about a lot of campaigns, but to this day the greatest upset was that race.”
Once he collected himself, Biden moved to address his supporters. “I hope I don’t let you all down,” he told them. “I may go down and be the lousiest senator in the world. I may be the best.”
Two days after the election, both men, in a show of bipartisanship, were scheduled to take part in a Delaware tradition in which the winning candidate and the losing candidate race each other in go-karts, then literally bury a hatchet in the sand. (I had to fact-check this five times before believing it to be true. It’s called Return Day. The day after losing an election, could you imagine John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton putting on a big smile and then hopping in a go-kart?) Out of respect for his decades of service, Biden offered to let Boggs skip the race. Boggs insisted.
And that was that. Joe Biden had just become the youngest senator-elect in a century, and the second youngest in the history of the United States, and along the way, he had toppled a Delaware legend. With his wife, Neilia, and three beautiful children, he had to think of himself as the luckiest guy on the planet.