Legal Commentary

Obama picks Veep nominee whose main claim to fame is being caught repeatedly as a plagiarist

By Beldar

As I post this, the NYT is announcing on its website that Barack Obama has chosen fellow senator Joe Biden as his running mate. If true, then Obama has apparently made NYT pundit David Brooks a happy man. He's certainly made me happier as a committed Obama opponent!

I'm pretty sure that David Brooks is a nice man. He is an articulate man. He can write and speak in complete sentences. Occasionally, he delivers some interesting punditry. But his op-ed earlier in today's NYT ? Hoping It's Biden ? is simply a monument to cluelessness.

Brooks writes that Biden "has disdain for privilege and for limousine liberals ? the mark of an honest, working-class Democrat." Brooks digs the hole deeper in listing "honesty" as among Biden's useful attributes as an Obama running-mate (emphasis in original):

Honesty. Biden?s most notorious feature is his mouth. But in his youth, he had a stutter. As a freshman in high school he was exempted from public speaking because of his disability, and was ridiculed by teachers and peers. His nickname was Dash, because of his inability to finish a sentence.

He developed an odd smile as a way to relax his facial muscles (it still shows up while he?s speaking today) and he?s spent his adulthood making up for any comments that may have gone unmade during his youth.

Today, Biden?s conversational style is tiresome to some, but it has one outstanding feature. He is direct. No matter who you are, he tells you exactly what he thinks, before he tells it to you a second, third and fourth time.

Presidents need someone who will be relentlessly direct. Obama, who attracts worshippers, not just staff members, needs that more than most.

This is awful logic ? in fact, it's not logic at all. I have no clue how Biden's high-school speech disability, or his resulting odd smile, relate to "honesty." This is just Brooks' babbling: Nothing in these paragraphs has anything to do with honesty.

Perhaps if Brooks wants to know about Biden's intrinsic honesty, and he won't read BeldarBlog on that subject, then he should at least read some of his employer's archives. Let's start with the fact that Biden has admitted to conduct which proves that he was a very dishonest young man: He was caught in, and then confessed to, an episode of repeatedly plagiarizing from a law review article in a class paper he submitted as a first-year law student:

The file distributed by the Senator included a law school faculty report, dated Dec. 1, 1965, that concluded that Mr. Biden had ''used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution'' and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had submitted the 15-page paper.

Got that? Biden stole someone else's legal scholarship, and passed it off as his own. He's lucky he wasn't expelled outright, but the F he received in that course as part of the penalty for his misconduct doesn't explain by itself how he managed to graduate only 76th out of 85 in his law school class.

(John McCain also graduated near the bottom of his class from Annapolis, and that also reflected a middling academic performance brought further down by conduct demerits ? but McCain's misbehavior mostly reflected his unwillingness to submit to Naval Academy hazing, and none of it involved cheating or any other violations of the Academy's famous Honor Code.)

Biden's law school cheating might be discounted if he'd learned his lesson and lived an exemplary, plagiarism-free life thereafter. But of course, he didn't. His own first run for the presidency exploded in 1987 when he was caught repeatedly plagiarizing again, and simultaneously caught telling obvious lies about his academic record:

Mr. Biden's troubles began with the revelation in The New York Times and The Des Moines Register that he had used, without attribution, long portions of a moving address by the British Labor Party leader, Neil Kinnock. Later, it emerged that he had also used passages from the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey.

Then, it was revealed that Mr. Biden had been disciplined as a first-year law student for using portions of a law review article in a paper without proper attribution. Mr. Biden tried to put the charges behind him by admitting to mistakes at a news conference, but he was hit again by a Newsweek magazine report on a videotape of an appearance in New Hampshire in which he misstated several facts about his academic career.

The "misstated facts" included a claim that he'd graduated from law school in the top half of his academic class.

Brooks does mention the "plagiarism scandal" later in his op-ed, among the "lesser crises" that have marked Biden's career. But Brooks doesn't seem to grasp that plagiarism is dishonesty and theft; he cites this as an example, absolutely inexplicably, of Biden's "loyalty":

[T]here are moments when a president has to go into the cabinet room and announce a decision that nearly everyone else on his team disagrees with. In those moments, he needs a vice president who will provide absolute support. That sort of loyalty comes easiest to people who have been down themselves, and who had to rely on others in their own moments of need.

Yes, indeed, Biden has shown that he can "rely on others" ? a law review author, Neil Kinnock, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert F. Kennedy among them ? during his own "moments of need," but how is that a good thing? And what on earth does that have to do with the kind of loyalty he'd show as a vice president?

Obama is choosing Biden for foreign policy and national security gravitas, and Biden does have many years of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But military acumen? Consider this, also revealed back in 1987:

The file also included Mr. Biden's transcript from his days as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. In his first three semesters, his grades were C's or D's, with three exceptions: two A's in physical education courses, a B in a course on ''Great English Writers'' and an F in R.O.T.C. The grades improved somewhat later but were never exceptional.

Yeah, that's the way to counter a war hero like McCain ? pick someone who flunked his course in the Reserve Officer Training Corps!

So what else besides lying, cheating, and flunking classes is Joe Biden famous for? Well, I guess he could point to his most conspicuous Senate accomplishment ? championing legislation favored by his home-state's large concentration of credit card companies to make it significantly harder for Americans to discharge their debts through bankruptcy. I expect we won't be hearing much about that legislative accomplishment, though, from the Obama-Biden '08 campaign.

For the grumpy old man to win, Obama needs to make mistakes that reveal his inexperience and poor judgment. In picking Biden, Obama's just made another ? a huge one whose importance will become increasingly clear as the campaign progresses.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on August 23, 2008 (boomark / email).