Biden Didn't Just Steal Kinnock's Words
He stole Kinnock's life. Jack Shafer, on Slate, shows why Biden's plagiarism was particularly creepy:

Biden didn't merely borrow words and phrasings from Kinnock, which is a time-honored practice of candidates and their speechwriters and is almost never regarded as plagiarism. He became Kinnock, as David Greenberg writes today, claiming things about himself and his family that were untrue and that he knew to be untrue.

In his closing remarks at an Aug. 23, 1987, debate at the Iowa State Fair*, Biden said:

I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?

Biden then gestured to his wife and continued:

Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?

Kinnock had said:

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

Pointing to his wife, Kinnock said:

Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?

...Reporters confirmed that Biden had repeatedly cited Kinnock as the source before abducting the Kinnock persona at the state fair. That didn't make the abduction any less egregious, though. Or any less weird. For instance, Biden wasn't the first in his family to attend college, as he claimed, conceding to E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Sept. 18, 1987, Times that ''there are Finnegans, my mother's family, that went to college.''

Biden had similarly echoed Kinnock by saying that his "ancestors ... worked the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours." He could produce no such ancestors upon request. The Times' Dowd also found Biden lifting Kinnock's "gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact," proof of his intimacy with the source material.

The only practical explanation for Biden's plagiarism is he guessed that being Kinnock on the stump would be more compelling for his audience than merely citing him. And he was probably right.

David Greenberg, also on Slate, had this, too:

Unfortunately for Biden, more revelations of plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. (In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his speech without Biden's knowledge; in another account, the failure to credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.

If that wasn't bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper that he submitted. He admitted as well that he had falsely stated that British Labor official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape. (Healey had denied the claim.) And Biden conceded that he had exaggerated in another matter by stating in a speech some years earlier that he had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters, and was thus actively involved in the civil rights movement. He protested, his press secretary clarified, "to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater." The latter two of these fibs were small potatoes by any reckoning, but in the context of other acts of dishonesty, they helped to form a bigger picture.

...The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates an unseemly air of hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race was the right thing to do.

Twenty-one years on, how much should Biden's past behavior matter? In and of itself, the plagiarism episode shouldn't automatically disqualify Biden from regaining favor and credibility, especially if in the intervening two decades he's not done more of the same, as seems to be the case. But no one has looked into it. The press should give his record since 1988 a thorough vetting. It's worth knowing whether the odds-on favorite to be our next vice president has truly reformed himself of behavior that can often be the mark of a deeply troubled soul.

Deeply troubled? I think that's a bit dramatic. I think he's just another sleaze who did whatever he thought he could get away with to get elected. You?