Campaign Portrait

By Laurence I. Barrett

Eloquent and occasionally irascible, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden last week officially announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. This is one of an occasional series of profiles of the major contenders for 1988.

The mood among 3,000 hometown supporters gathered in front of the restored Victorian train station in Wilmington, Del., was as buoyant as the red, white and blue balloons waiting to be unleashed to the sky. Yet there was Joe Biden, gambling that he could pump up the crowd even higher while challenging his middle-class neighbors with the specter of a "nation at risk" from materialist values, declining industries, drug abuse, inadequate schools and kids abandoned to poverty. "It is the plight of our children that is the moral test of our time," he roared in a voice that bounced off the surrounding buildings.

His handsome features taut, his fist balled in indignation, Biden was in danger of losing his audience by painting a vivid picture of ghetto hopelessness. So totally did he capture his listeners, however, that their approval punctuated the meticulous cadence of his clincher: "And these are not someone else's children. They are our children. ((Applause begins.)) America's children. ((More applause.)) Blood of our blood. ((A louder ripple.)) Heart of our soul." This was Biden at his best, the impassioned idealist displaying the soaring rhetoric that has become his trademark.

Biden's mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability. During a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year, Biden came across as a hothead seeking hot headlines as he relentlessly badgered Secretary of State George Shultz over U.S. policy toward South Africa. The day after, he approached a friend on the Senate floor and asked sheepishly, "How much do you think I lost on that? I guess I made a fool of myself."

The contrast between his highly effective speaking style and his occasional giddy lapses is curious in a politician who thinks of himself as "grounded" in both his psyche and his message. All his Democratic competitors save Jesse Jackson seem bland by comparison, technocrats who emphasize specific programs and highlight their resumes. Biden's long suit is his appeal to idealism, his promise to be a President who would lead by strength of will and uncompromising candor.

At 44, Biden is a few years ahead of the baby boomers, but he professes to be a card-carrying member of their generation. Using language appropriated from John Kennedy and reworked by Pollster Pat Caddell, Biden exhorts those from their 20s to their 40s to trade up from dreary materialism to exhilarating activism. "The cynics believe that my generation has forgotten," he says in one of his stump speeches. "They believe that the ideals and compassion and conviction to change the world that marked our youth is now nothing but a long-faded wisp of adolescence . . . But they have misjudged us." By no coincidence, the group that he implores "to put our own stamp on the face and character of America, to bend history just a bit" makes up an estimated 58% of next year's eligible voters.

Biden remains at the bottom of polls, but party donors, who know that ! preliminary surveys are not critical, have put his campaign treasury in the penthouse with more than $2 million in contributions. Says Republican Analyst John Sears: "Biden, on paper, has more to work with in putting together a broadly based candidacy than any of the other Democrats."

Yet as Biden traveled the country last week, he was trailed by doubts about his ability to convert paper assets to real ones. His overtures to the new generation should have helped him attract support from Gary Hart's ruined campaign, but so far few voters have followed. Some party workers are put off by Biden's verbal excesses. Says an Iowa activist whom Biden has unsuccessfully courted: "He might just talk himself out of the nomination."

A study in chutzpah when performing extemporaneously, Biden continues to generate needless friction with careless remarks. Asked last week whether he would consider Jesse Jackson as a running mate, Biden could have ducked the question. Instead, he said that Jackson lacks experience in elective office. The next day he backed off, saying the discussion was "silly" because Jackson is far ahead of him in polls.

Biden's intimates can see trouble coming, as they did earlier this month. A reporter mildly challenged him about earlier speeches in Iowa. Biden responded with his devilish Jack Nicholson grin, a sign that a wisecrack is winning the struggle to get out. Then came his staccato chuckle -- heh-heh-heh -- and the zinger, a complaint that the newspaper had been too cheap to send the reporter to Iowa. As he often does, Biden later apologized.

Biden recognizes that these incidents feed the perception that he is a gabby lightweight. He is no "hothead," he insists; certain occasions warrant anger, but his temper is "measured." One friend suggests that the hip shooting comes from a "complicated mix of the emotional and the calculating." A Biden aide observes that "somewhere in him is the Irish Catholic kid struggling to show 'them' that he's as good as they are."

During his 14 years in the Senate, Biden has dug deep into a few issues that engage him, such as the SALT II treaty and the 1984 omnibus crime bill, which he helped steer to enactment through liberal-conservative cross fire. But he has never become a recognized leader on any single large question. He has a short attention span, say his critics. He is eclectic, reply his supporters. He has ambitions that the Senate hierarchy could not satisfy, chorus all.

Friends who knew Biden decades ago in Delaware recall all three attributes in the brash Irish boy whose charm could command a crowd even then. The Biden family had moved from Scranton when their firstborn, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., was ten. They settled in a neat, three-bedroom house in a middle-class suburban development called Mayfield. Joe Sr., who never attended college, sold Chevrolets. Joe Jr. shared a room with his two brothers. Valerie, who would grow up to manage her brother's campaigns, was the lucky occupant of the third bedroom.

The man who is now one of his party's foremost orators suffered severely with a stutter in his youth. In freshman Latin class at a Catholic high school, recitation was particularly difficult for young Joe. "Jimmy O'Neill, a great prankster, hung me with the nickname Impedimenta, Biden recalls. "I was the impediment." Over the next few years, the youngster shook his affliction. "I forced myself. I memorized passages and practiced a cadence." Despite the speech problem, Biden had the good looks and sincere geniality that won friends. "I always knew I had the ability to persuade people," he recalls.

Although Biden has said that the civil rights movement in the early 1960s first awakened his political consciousness, he was no campus activist during his four years as an indifferent student at the University of Delaware. In fact, he now acknowledges that he participated in desegregation demonstrations "only in a very minor sense": black lifeguards at the swimming pool where he worked during the summer invited him to join in some picketing in Wilmington. Later, as a law student at Syracuse University, Biden avoided antiwar protests.

As a new lawyer in Wilmington, Biden flirted with the moderate G.O.P. establishment while clerking for a Republican firm. "I thought of myself as a Republican for six or seven months, no longer," he says. He quickly found more stimulating work as an assistant to a Democratic activist who specialized in criminal and negligence cases. In 1970, just two years out of law school, Biden ran successfully as an underdog candidate for the local county council. Even before he took his council seat, he was planning his next campaign, against Caleb Boggs, Delaware's Republican Senator who was generally regarded as unbeatable. After two years of campaigning, Biden upset Boggs by just 1% of the vote in 1972. At age 30, Biden would become the Senate's youngest member.

& Six weeks later his world was shattered. On a highway near Wilmington, a truck collided with the family station wagon, killing his wife Neilia, 27, and daughter Naomi, 13 months. His two sons, Beau, 3, and Hunter, 2, were critically injured. Rushing back from Washington, where he had been recruiting staff, Biden considered resigning. Instead, his sister Valerie and her husband moved into his house to care for the boys, and Biden began to commute daily between Wilmington and Washington by train, 90 minutes each way. The difficult routine became so much a hallmark of his Senate career that Biden chose the Wilmington train station to kick off his presidential campaign.

Although Biden stayed in the Senate, his loss left him morose and distracted. His characteristic ebullience did not re-emerge until 1975, when he met Jill Jacobs, a schoolteacher, whom he married two years later. By then, Biden, still an obscure junior Senator, was beginning to eye the White House.

Four years ago, Biden almost ran against Democratic Front Runner Walter Mondale at the urging of Patrick Caddell, the controversial, often contentious political pollster who has preached the political power of the baby-boom generation. An early race would have been a typically bold move, and Biden still believes in Caddell's strategy for challenging the conventional leadership. But Biden finally said no: his daughter Ashley was only two, and his sons were still in high school. Caddell took his plan to Hart, becoming a principal strategist of the strongest challenge to Mondale. Later Caddell, a Biden adviser since 1972, announced that he would work for his friend or no one else in 1988. "In political terms," says a former ally, "Joe and Pat are really one candidate."

With 1988 on the horizon, Biden once more agonized over the decision. He fretted about his family and wondered whether he could campaign and also remain effective as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As more single- minded competitors went into overdrive last fall and winter, Biden inched along in second gear. In New Hampshire one night last October, Biden and his son Hunter were searching for a restaurant that might still be serving dinner, when he again began ruminating about family concerns. Turning to Hunter in the dark van, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" The teenager had a prompt response: "You should. If you don't do it now, I couldn't see you doing it some other time." Biden sighed: "Yeah, that's the thing."

Something else was nibbling at his resolve. The competition didn't faze him much, nor did he doubt his ability to master specific issues. But on the 7:20 p.m. to Wilmington recently, Biden talked quietly about the next President's responsibility "not only to have the right answers but also to energize this country at a time when it's both optimistic and doubting . . . I'd sit there and talk to myself and say, 'Am I the guy? Am I the guy to be able to do this?' . . . It's a very sobering thing." Yes, he finally told himself, I am the guy.