Constitutional Biden-Civil liberties' greatest salesman.

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Constitutional Biden by Jeffrey Rosen
Civil liberties' greatest salesman.
Post Date Wednesday, September 24, 2008


The Obama-Biden slate is historic in many ways, but for law professors it has a special cachet: It's the first time that professors of constitutional law have occupied both slots on a ticket. Barack Obama was a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and Joe Biden has been an adjunct professor at Widener University School of Law since 1991. More to the point, it's the most civil-libertarian ticket ever fielded by a major U.S. political party.

Moments after the September 11 attacks, as Biden watched his colleagues evacuate the Capitol, a reporter asked him whether America would have to revisit the way it protects our public institutions. "I hope that's not true," Biden replied, according to his autobiography. "{If} we have to alter our civil liberties, change the way we function, then we have truly lost the war."

It was a telling response, given the situation unfolding around him--and a perfect reflection of his career. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the veteran of some of the most bruising Supreme Court confirmation battles, Biden did more than champion civil liberties. He developed an uncanny knack for making them politically palatable to Middle America. In fact, during the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, he shepherded a new and expansive conception of privacy into public discourse. This gift for marketing civil liberties won't just serve Obama well as he rebuts Republican attacks during the campaign; if the ticket prevails, Biden's instincts will help guide the selection of judges and the challenging task of reconstructing civil liberties after the assault of the last eight years.

In his autobiography, Promises to Keep, Biden argues that he derived his approach to government from his working-class, Catholic upbringing in the 1950s. His father, who managed a car dealership, lectured him at the dinner table about the horrors of the Holocaust and once quit a job when he saw the boss, at an office Christmas party, throw silver dollars on the floor to watch his employees scramble. "The one thing my mother could not stand was meanness," Biden writes. "She once shipped my brother off with instructions to bloody the nose of a kid who was picking on smaller kids. ... Religious figures and authority figures got no exemption. They abuse their power, you bloody their nose." (In an autobiographical video, Obama told the Democratic Convention that his mother taught him a similar lesson.)

This visceral distaste for abuses of power has undergirded his passionate defense of the right to privacy. Call it the blue-collar view of civil liberties: You defend the little guy against the bullying intrusions of government.

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