As bemused commentators would note decades later, it was all straight from the playbook of Tea Party darling Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand-worshiping congressman from Wisconsin who was bent on taking a meat cleaver to Medicare and Social Security. When Biden ran directly against Ryan for vice president in 2012, he warned voters Ryan was a threat to their hard-earned entitlements.20
Though the freeze failed, it was only the beginning. Biden’s ongoing distaste for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution didn’t stop him from introducing a similar amendment in 1984, this one tying spending to the growth of gross national product and inflation, which he referred to as a “pay-as-you-go” measure. Calling it a “much more realistic approach,” he proudly boasted that he had “literally plagiarized” it from du Pont, a Republican. Later that year, Biden backed the line-item veto—an anti-spending measure cherished by Reagan, the conservative movement, and, incidentally, Burris—and another budget measure, this one successful, requiring Congress to vote on freezing the budget for one year before it could raise the debt ceiling. His campaign then ran radio ads claiming that “cutting the deficit is more important than party differences.”21
Undergirding all this was the endless quest for campaign cash. To keep Burris at bay, Biden again drew on the paradoxical coalition of union and corporate donors to fund his campaign. Declining Burris’s challenge to limit spending at $1 million each, he raised $1.3 million by September, more than double his opponent, with most of his money coming not from individuals but PACs (it was vice versa for Burris, who had a mere $18,000 left by this point). On Biden’s donor list, names like the Seafarers Union, United Steelworkers, and United Mine Workers sat uneasily next to Chrysler, General Electric, and Pfizer. His campaign mailed 20,000 copies of a letter signed by local corporate bigwigs (including a du Pont) declaring him “a leader on fiscal responsibility.”22
As in 1978, Biden endorsed a core tenet of conservatism shortly before the election. Where he’d previously come out for fiscal austerity, he now took aim at the role of government.
“I see less of federal government dictating to the states,” he said. The federal government had “changed the mindset of the states” over the past 30 years, meaning “federal involvement with social and racial problems is less required” as long as antidiscrimination laws stayed on the books. He said he believed “education is best left to the states” and argued “you could make that case … for a whole range of areas where heretofore the federal government was involved.” Government, he said, would stay involved in the environment and issues like the global drug trade, but it would be “less involved in direct social questions like day care, education or health.”23
It’s debatable how far Reagan’s politics had actually seeped into the hearts and minds of the American public. After all, millions of working-class Americans of all races and backgrounds continued to rely on the federal government to keep them from poverty, ill health, or death’s door, and almost half the country didn’t even bother voting. But Biden appeared to be one of the converts. As his defeated opponent remarked in the wake of the election: “Win, lose or draw, Joe Biden isn’t a liberal any more … I think that’s a victory.”24
For his part, Biden blamed the Democrats for Reagan’s success. He urged them to support efforts to “clean our house” through a budget freeze and tax reform.25
Biden’s freeze never came to pass, but he did finally get the latter. Three years out from another election, Biden joined all but three of the Senate’s Democrats to hand Reagan another victory, passing the tax overhaul the president had requested. There would now be only four brackets, and while tax rates would rise for the lowest bracket, the rate for the top bracket was slashed from 50 percent to 28 percent, another boon for the nation’s wealthiest.
“On balance the bill is a good one,” said Biden. He wasn’t alone: the tax bill was the brainchild of two Democrats and passed with huge bipartisan majorities. The Reagan Revolution, it seemed, had been brought to the public by the Democrats.26
Biden would eventually realize the error of his ways. After years of spiraling deficits caused partly by the “tax bubble” he had helped create, Biden would vote in 1990 to raise taxes on the wealthy. But with anti-tax sentiment by then firmly lodged in the post-Reagan Republican Party, the measure failed, and the lopsided tax system stayed in place for years.27
Lest his vote for tax cuts suggest Biden wasn’t serious about cutting the deficit, he also put his support behind the Gramm-Rudman bill, a budget-balancing measure that split the Democrats. Mandating a balanced federal budget by 1991, the legislation required the president to make spending cuts across the board (with some exceptions) if Congress failed to do so, leading to years of austerity for the nation’s cities. Timid, uncertain, and on the back foot with another election looming, Democrats landed all over the place on Gramm-Rudman, with stalwart liberal Ted Kennedy backing it to prove he was serious about wrangling the deficit and neoliberal Gary Hart, trying to prove he wasn’t a compassionless automaton, opposing it. Staying true to his new beliefs, Biden voted “aye.”28
Biden may have told himself his evolution was necessary to update Roosevelt’s legacy for an era of rising anti-government sentiment and a future where Democrats believed “that the New Deal is old but that the commitments of the New Deal are real,” as he put it. This is certainly how Democrats would come to justify the “triangulation” of the Clinton era, as the party took up Biden’s victory-through-right-wing-camouflage approach as their ethos.29
But maybe there was another way. While Biden reacted to conservatism’s ascent by doing his best to shed the label of “liberal,” five hundred miles to the north, a middle-aged activist and documentarian named Bernie Sanders became mayor of the largest city of the then-conservative state of Vermont while calling himself a “socialist.” Like Biden, he too adapted his politics to the mood of the era. But instead of railing against government, fearmongering about the deficit, and relying on the largesse of a corporate class whose worldview he would come to adopt, Sanders launched an anti-tax crusade from the left, seeking to shift Burlington’s tax burden from put-upon property owners to businesses and the rich while coordinating with a grassroots movement of activists to fight for the interests of working families and the poor. As Mayor Sanders tussled with the painful cuts imposed on his city by Reagan, Biden, and the rest of Congress, he fought a pitched war with the local conservative establishment, rallying a coalition of voters—and, crucially, nonvoters—to his side and ultimately transforming his city into a bastion of progressivism controlled by a coalition of like-minded aldermen.
Sanders’s success in Burlington during the 1980s serves as a glance back down a road ultimately not traveled. As Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party doubled down on their rightward drift in the years ahead, Sanders’s achievements suggested a way other than the Third Way might have been possible. Instead Biden helped drag a dazed Democratic Party over to his side of the political spectrum.
Moving the Party
In September 1987, as the Senate Judiciary Committee took a break from grilling Reagan’s latest Supreme Court nominee, the ultraconservative Robert Bork who was ultimately defeated in a close Senate vote, Joe Biden, his wife, his sister, and her husband filed into its hearing room, suddenly packed with dozens of cameras, microphones, and reporters. Three and a half months after officially announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, he was now officially ending it.30
Biden had run a campaign vastly better financed than almost all of his rivals and had charmed both the Democratic donor class and media establishment with his Kennedyesque aura and centrist bona fides. While he hadn’t lit up the polls, it was still early, and with none of the other candidates catching fire, it wasn’t hard to imagine the young, exciting candidate carving out at least some chunk of votes in the first primary contests in early 1988.
Instead, his campaign had disintegrated over the course of eleven days as a series of personal scandals turned Biden’s name into a hack columnist’s punch line for years to come, closing the door on another presidential run for decades more. He could at least take solace in one victory, however: though Biden failed to