We Learned Everything We Needed to Know About Biden in 1988

Alexander Stille, a professor of international journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, writes in The New Republic:

Biden was preparing his first run for president in January 1988, his closest aides made an emergency trip to Wilmington to talk the candidate out of what they considered a disastrous folly: buying another house. Biden was already struggling to pay off the debt on another equally grand house, a 10,000-square-foot Du Pont mansion whose upkeep had put his finances in disarray. As Richard Ben Cramer describes it in his book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, a masterpiece about the 1988 election and a remarkably prescient portrait of Biden, the 44-year-old senator drove his advisers all around Wilmington in his Bronco truck, trying to explain why he absolutely must have this other house on top of the one he couldn’t afford.

“The first thing you’ve got to know about Joe is the house. Probably the first thing he will show you,” Cramer begins, referring to Biden’s Du Pont mansion. “It’s the kind of a place 1,000 Italian guys died building. A library fit for a Carnegie, a living room about half an acre … whatever he gets, the house eats for breakfast. That house loves cash.… So that’s why Joe decided he had to have another house this time. It was 17 acres, a $1.1 million estate … an enormous main house with a sauna in the master bath, a swell apartment over the four-car garage … and the outdoor pool had a separate cabana that was itself like a nice suburban home.… And then there was the tennis house with the other sauna and the indoor pool … and, of course, the indoor tennis court … it was a compound … it was … Hyannisport! He could see the goddamn thing in Life magazine.”

One of Biden’s aides told him, “You can’t run as a Democrat, a guy who’s in touch with middle-class values when you’re on TV in your indoor tennis court.” But Biden wasn’t listening, Cramer reports: “No, he said, with a dazzling Biden smile, into the sudden silence … there was another house. (‘Believe it or not … this other thing happened.…’) And this time, he got all three of them into the Bronco for the trip to the city.”

Cramer’s book, published in 1992, describes a whole range of Biden behavior and reflexes that we are seeing all too clearly in the current stand-off between the president and those who are trying to persuade him to drop out of the presidential race: single-minded fixation on a goal; a stubborn refusal to listen to advice or contrary evidence; a willingness to act and never to doubt or second-guess himself; a seemingly infinite belief in his ability to beat the odds, to talk anyone into anything; and a conviction of being a man destined for greatness. “The house, the world, were malleable to his will,” Cramer writes.

These behaviors have often served him well—he did eventually become president—although it is worth recalling that in 1988 he was forced to withdraw from the race after it was discovered he plagiarized a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock. Biden’s aides were also not wrong about his real estate obsession: He spent much of his life juggling multiple mortgages, underwater in debt, and when he retired from the Senate he was the chamber’s poorest member. “There was (to be perfectly blunt, as Joe would say) a breathtaking element of balls,” Cramer writes. “Joe Biden had balls. Lots of times, more balls than sense. This was from the jump—as a little kid. He was little, too, but you didn’t want to fight him—or dare him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do.” 

What Cramer shows beautifully is that you have to be a little crazy to want to run for president, to believe you can and should be the most powerful person in the world. It requires an almost pathological belief in yourself and your destiny. In Biden’s case, Cramer describes the strange combination of inferiority and superiority complex, failure and success, that become fused into a powerful, stubborn, preternatural determination that he can overcome any obstacle.

But Biden appears to have failed to heed a lesson his mother imparted to him, according to Cramer: “The most important was: tell the truth, and do what you promised.”

Biden in 2020 promised to be a “bridge” or “transition” candidate, reportedly telling his advisers he wouldn’t seek a second term, and now is failing to face—and tell—the truth about his obvious cognitive decline, about his historically low approval rating, and the widespread view among voters that he should step aside. The world at 81 years old looks very different from when he was 44, and his deep-seated character traits now have hardened into something quite different. His gritty determination looks like blind obstinacy, his boundless belief in himself seems like arrogant self-regard, and his attempt to bend the world to his will appears like a delusion of grandeur.