Style, Substance Pose Key Test for a Biden Candidacy

“It’s a shame you don’t have my standing in the polls,” Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. told Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., the newest of his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, at a fund-raising brunch here last Sunday.

“I’ve been out doing this for a year,” Biden reminded the audience of 400 party loyalists, “and I want you to know I’ve got 1%.”

For the time being, Biden can afford to joke about the minimal impression his still undeclared candidacy has made in opinion surveys. He is demonstrably the best fund-raiser in the Democratic field and, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, is generally ranked as the best orator.

And, probably most important of all, he seems to have figured out a way to wring maximum political advantage from his oratorical talent by tailoring his candidacy to match it. Biden argues that the key to presidential accomplishment, more critical than managerial experience and program blueprints, is the ability to mobilize the citizenry.

“Ultimately,” Biden declares, “the President has to speak to and lead the value changes that have to take place in this country.”

But by placing such great stress on personal leadership qualities, Biden inevitably invites intense scrutiny of his own personality. The long-range challenge facing Biden’s candidacy is whether his style and character can stand up to the inspection he will get from hard-eyed political professionals and a moody electorate.

Already his rivals are firing away at what they believe to be the fundamental flaw in Biden’s strategy--the emphasis on style over substance. “His basic problem is that he doesn’t have a substantive message,” said William Carrick, campaign manager for Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who has focused his own candidacy on efforts to cut the U.S. trade deficit.

Carrick argues that Biden is running a campaign designed for 1984, when many Democrats were looking for a candidate who could match the inspirational talents of President Reagan. “Now,” Carrick said, “there’s more interest in having hands-on competence in government”--a trait that happens to be one of the strong points Gephardt claims for himself.

Details Social Welfare Plan

Biden’s strategists are confident that a series of position papers will refute the charge that their man lacks substance. On Friday, for example, Biden outlined a broad plan for redirecting federal assistance to poor youngsters, calling for free health care for all poor children up to age 12, for doubling the size of the Head Start program and for changes in welfare and tax laws to strengthen family ties.

As for governmental experience, Biden’s aides point out that their candidate has served in the Senate since 1973, longer than any of his rivals have held positions of comparable responsibility.

Some Senate staffers have privately criticized Biden’s legislative record, complaining that his rhetoric often exceeds his accomplishments. But his aides reject such claims, noting that Biden co-authored the 1984 comprehensive crime bill that recodified the criminal code, played a major role in the unsuccessful battle to ratify the SALT II treaty in 1979 and was a key senator in the drive to re-enact the Voting Rights Act.

Some See Him as Blowhard

But another sort of criticism is harder to rebut. Although Biden often comes across to many listeners as a soul-stirring rhetorician, he sometimes strikes others as a bumptious blowhard.

That might not matter much to other candidates. But to Biden, for whom the ability to read and shape the public mood is critical, any persistent glitch in communicating could be fatal.

Earlier this year at an Iowa press conference, Biden seemed to suggest that governors--presumably including Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, a declared presidential candidate, and Mario M. Cuomo of New York, who had not yet taken himself out of the race--were not qualified for the presidency because they lacked foreign policy experience. In response, respected Des Moines Register columnist James Flansburg denounced Biden’s “sophomoric” reasoning.

Heavy-Handed Barbs

And at the fund-raising brunch here last weekend, where the speakers were directed to play for laughter, Biden slashed away at two of his rivals, Dukakis and Gephardt, not with a rapier but with a bludgeon.

Taking note of the flood of favorable publicity Dukakis’ candidacy has received in his home-state newspaper, the Boston Globe, which circulates widely in New Hampshire, Biden suggested that “his family owns the damn papers.”

And addressing Dukakis, who was seated beside Gephardt at the speaker’s table, Biden said: “I just think you’d have a little bit of decency to allow Dick Gephardt the chance to come up here and pander like he does in Iowa.”

Although Biden drew some laughs, others in the audience regarded his comments as gratuitous and heavy-handed--a further indication that to some ears his reputed eloquence sounds more like glibness.

“If someone accused him of being slick, I’d have a hard time defending him,” said a former senior staff member in New Hampshire for the ill-fated Gary Hart campaign. Biden recently met with about 20 former Hart workers and asked them to join his campaign.

“He was charming and well-versed on the issues,” said this Hart veteran, who asked not to be identified. “But I wasn’t convinced of his sincerity.”

Biden’s backers assert that any shortcomings will ultimately be overshadowed by his strengths, especially his skill at moving audiences of all sizes and descriptions.

At the California Democratic convention last winter, for example, the hundreds of delegates seemed to hang on Biden’s every word when he exhorted them to “transform the tired blood of our politics with new passion and energy.” And last week in an office building atrium here in Manchester, he enthralled about 35 potential supporters with a shorter, more pointed version of the same speech.

Underscoring Family Ties

Biden, whose closeness with his family is counted as a political asset, began his talk here while holding his somewhat restless 5-year-old daughter in his arms. “This is Ashley,” he said. “She makes her speech at the beginning.”

After putting her down, he outlined his view of the presidency. The next chief executive, Biden said, “is really going to have a chance to bend history. The next President of the United States will succeed or fail in large part on whether or not he or she understands that the role of President is to do more than preside over government.”

In the view of his supporters, Biden is creating a unique niche for himself among contemporary Democratic politicians. They concede that the party has other stirring speakers, including Cuomo, Jackson and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

But these three are at their best appealing to traditional Democratic audiences--party activists, blacks and union members. Biden’s potential strength is that he can reach broader groups of Americans whose support the Democrats desperately need to recapture the White House after losing four out of five presidential elections.

The model for this type of candidacy was outlined in a memo drafted last winter by pollster Patrick Caddell, Biden’s close friend and a longtime political adviser. “A Democratic nominee,” Caddell concluded, “must be able to hold the traditional base of the party while simultaneously reaching out to both the newer elements of the party and the unaffiliated,” particularly in the suburbs and the rural South.

Biden’s strategists believe that he can fill that order in part because he wants government to play a different role--and in some respects a more limited one--from that advocated by traditional Democrats in the past and, Biden contends, by some of his 1988 competitors.

“There are some that may have a more optimistic view about the extent to which government alone can change things,” Biden said in an interview on a chartered flight from Manchester to his home in Wilmington.

‘Attitudes Must Change’

Such views belong to the past, Biden said, when “some Democrats thought you could mandate people to do things that you can’t mandate them to do.” To reinvigorate the economy, reform education and curb drug abuse, he said, “not only do new programs have to be enacted, but public attitudes have to be changed.”

And this, Biden stressed, is the President’s key role. The chief executive can mold attitudes, Biden suggested, “for example, by saying that a mark of being a contributing and loyal American is how hard you work and the quality of products you make.”

Biden’s new programs, in contrast with some past Democratic blueprints, appear cautious and deliberate. In his recently released economic policy statement, he figures that he could trim $30 billion a year from the deficit by trimming “wasteful” defense spending, converting import quotas into tariffs and levying a fee on oil imports.

New programs would have to be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis by specific revenue increases. But Biden would not propose any significant hike in income taxes, at least at the start of his presidency.

“A Democratic President will not be able to initiate a significant tax increase until he first demonstrates to people that he can make the government work,” Biden said. “The reason they don’t want to increase welfare payments is not that they don’t think welfare people need the money, but they think they are going to buy sunglasses or a fifth of vodka or something.”

Robert Litan, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who has been advising Biden on economic policy, said: “Biden would be an activist President, but he would not necessarily have an activist government. He would use the presidency as a bully pulpit and get people to move in the direction he wants them to go.”

Inspirational Skills

If Biden’s approach to governing appears to require an act of faith by voters to support him, that helps to explain why his backers put such stress on his considerable inspirational skills. Although it is far too early to tell whether those talents can overcome questions about the direction in which Biden wants to move the country, some Democrats see his slow start in the polls as an indication that he has not yet sent a clear enough signal to the voters.

“He is a puzzle,” said Iowa Democratic representative and former state party chairman Dave Nagle, who is so far uncommitted to any presidential contender. “He’s an awesome speaker, but people don’t know quite what to make of him. It’s like a calf looking at a new gate.”

Biden’s gifts have been impressive enough to win him the backing of some big-name Democrats at the national level and in key states. Rep. Peter W. Rodino Jr. of New Jersey and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii are co-chairing his national campaign.

Here in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first presidential primary next year, Biden has the backing of three of the four members of the state’s delegation to the Democratic National Committee. And, in Iowa, where the Democratic delegate selection process begins in precinct caucuses next February, Lowell Junkins, the party’s defeated candidate for governor, is Biden’s top man.

Such celebrities help to give a candidate credibility, but they are no substitute for nuts-and-bolts organizing.

“They’ve got the best names in the state,” said New Hampshire Democratic Chairman Joseph Grandmaison, who is neutral in the presidential contest. “But I don’t know how much they know about grass-roots politics.”