The First Time Joe Dropped Out
So what will happen now as the White House has gone into denial mode about the president’s weak performance in last week’s debate with Trump? The debate produced no rational discourse on the major issues of our time, and it’s unlikely we will hear anything of substance through the remainder of the campaign if Biden chooses to stay in the race.
On that question, I turned the other day to Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992), perhaps the best book on a presidential campaign in our time. Cramer spent six years researching and writing the book. He reported on six Democratic and Republican contenders, including Biden, who withdrew after allegations of plagiarism and lying. (Cramer, who died of lung cancer in 2013, was a friend of mine.)
Cramer was given broad access to Biden and his family, including his wife Jill. Biden was elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972 by a few thousand votes at the age of twenty-nine, after a come-from-behind race against incumbent J. Caleb Boggs, a two-term moderate Republican who had served in the US Army in Normandy, Germany, and Central Europe. Cramer recounts a turning point in a final debate with Boggs—one now filled with irony, considering what happened the other night: “Some wise-ass,” Cramer writes, “asked a trick question about a treaty. . . . Joe happened to know what it was. “But Boggs was confused. He stumbled around. Poor old g
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