Sleeper Candidate

In Sleeper Candidate, Bill Whalen examines potential 2008 presidential candidate Joe Biden.

IMAGINE THAT RIP VAN WINKLE was a Democrat--one waking up from an 18-year slumber.

As Rip nodded off in the summer of 1987, his party was mobilizing to take down a conservative Supreme Court nominee. Rip's fellow Dems needed the win: They'd lost two national elections during the decade to a president they were convinced was a lunkhead; opinions differed over whether the party needed to chart a more moderate course. But Rip remembered that help was on the way in the form of New York's most glamorous Democrat (Mario Cuomo), who was the odds-on-favorite to be the next president. Not much has changed. And there's been one other constant in Rip's life: Joe Biden, now as then, running for president.

Whalen also reminds us why Biden's 1988 campaign failed.

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, Biden's campaign unraveled only three-and-a-months after he first announced when it was revealed--by a rival operative, who leaked incriminated videotapes to the press--that the Delaware senator has been plagiarizing other politicians' material, including words from a television ad by former British Labor leader Neil Kinnock and speeches by Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey.

Read the article and see how closely he copied off the people he was plagarizing.