Opinion: Joe Biden has been off his own campaign trail too long
By Karen Tumulty Karen Tumulty Columnist covering national politics Email Bio Follow Columnist April 5 at 4:15 PM Former vice president Joe Biden is not yet in the 2020 race, but his vulnerabilities have already made their formal announcement.
In presidential campaigns, early stumbles are most likely to become long-term problems if they reinforce something voters already think they know about a candidate: that Hillary Clinton was using a private email server because she had something to hide; that Al Gore’s claim to have invented the Internet was not a slip of the tongue, but the tell of a serial exaggerator; that Rick Perry’s lapse of memory about the third federal agency he would eliminate showed he wasn’t very bright.
Plagiarism doomed his first presidential race in 1987; where Biden had initially attributed passages in his stump speech to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, he started lifting Kinnock’s biography as his own, and had to bow out when those lapses got noticed. It has been more than a decade since Biden appeared on a ballot as something other than a wingman. He spent most of the intervening years wrapped in the protective trappings and acclaim that go with the nation’s second-highest office.
It took several days before he seemed to understand the need for a do-over, in a video in which he took responsibility for the offense. But, in short order, he was joking about asking people for permission to hug them at a union event.
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