And Then There Were Six

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The C-SPAN tape was the final blow in a barrage of stories that threatened not just to overwhelm Biden's presidential campaign but to endanger his prospects for re-election to the Senate in 1990. Two days of conferences reached the inevitable conclusion. Biden would have to go through what is becoming a new ritual of presidential politics: the press conference at which a candidate reluctantly pulls out of the race before a single primary vote has been cast.

Nothing in Biden's campaign became him like the leaving of it. Unlike Gary Hart four months earlier, he sounded wistful rather than self-righteous. Bidding farewell to supporters in Iowa on Thursday, he asserted, "Nobody did this to Joe Biden. There had to be something there . . . to stitch together." Addressing reporters directly, he added, "I think you all have treated me fairly. I have no rancor, no complaints."

Biden's withdrawal will probably not have any profound effect on the Democratic race. Rivals did fear that he could eventually become a serious threat, since his hot oratory made him stand out from a rather bland field. But he was running near the bottom of national polls among Democrats. He had done better in Iowa, which will select the first delegates to the Democratic Convention in caucuses next Feb. 8, but even there his support seems likely to scatter too widely to make much difference. Analysis of the second choices of probable caucus-goers polled by the Des Moines Register indicates Gephardt, Dukakis and Jesse Jackson might all gain 2 or 3 points, a minor pickup in a state in which no candidate has yet won the support of even a fourth of all voters polled.

What the departure of Biden does is deepen the air of frustration hanging over the splintered Democratic race. Since the nomination campaign began with high hopes, all the news has been negative for the party: Hart's and Biden's crackups, the refusal of such powers as Mario Cuomo and Sam Nunn to enter, the persistence of the demeaning seven-dwarfs metaphor. (Unless Pat Schroeder officially enters, that will have to be changed to the six -- what? Survivors?) About the only consolation is that Biden did not come close to threatening Hart's world speed record for political self-immolation. Biden quit the race eleven days after the first negative stories broke; Hart was out in only five days.