My (Long Ago ) Joe Biden Moment

For a politician like Senator Joe Biden - now Barak Obama's running mate - who has been around forever, there are probably about 10 million people who have met him in one way or another. Nevertheless, political junkie that I am, I can’t resist telling my own “Joe Biden moment”.

It was the fall of 1974 and I was newly 17, a high school student in Richard Nixon’s hometown, Whittier California, and fresh with the glow of a new drivers license and the joy of having just watched Nixon get politically drowned in Watergate. It was a time of heady days.

I was also an addicted Democratic activist in town so Republican that the Nixon Room at the local public library still stood proud, resignation or not. So when the national Democratic Party doled out speaking gigs to party figures to come in and campaign for local candidates who would all lose, it was the unknowns who came visiting.

One of those was an obscure former Southern Governor, so obscure in fact that instead of actually having him speak anywhere we just had him knock on doors in the suburban metropolis of Norwalk. Two years later he was elected President, probably carrying Norwalk handily. You just never know.

Another visitor tossed in for a 24-hour visit to ‘loser land’ by National Democrats was a 31-year-old freshman Senator from Delaware. Also not a major draw, local party officials had him speak to two audiences. One was a small gathering at local Whittier College (Nixon’s alma mater). The other was my request that Senator Joe Biden come and speak at my high school – a lone pocket of Latinos in a sea of powder blue Republican leisure suits.

You might imagine my youthful excitement as I met Biden, with his driver, in the Pioneer High School parking lot.

I was by that time a seasoned political veteran, enough to not repeat the mistake I had made the year before when I convinced our local State Senator (and future Governor, George Deukmejian) to come and debate the death penalty. As soon as the rock-ribbed conservative got out of his car he announced that he needed to pee. A wiser head might have shown him to the faculty lounge. Instead I ushered the man in the black pinstripes into the boys’ bathroom where, this being the mid-1970s and California, a coterie of my classmates were smoking pot in the stalls.

The funny thing is that our future Governor seemed not even to notice the smoke or the smell.

Within minutes of Biden’s pot and bathroom-free arrival the two of us were standing on a stage before a cheering packed gymnasium of nearly a thousand students, none of whom has a clue who the guy next to me was but all grateful to be released from some combination of Mr. Riggins’ tiresome English class or early morning laps for P.E.

My introduction of Biden may have been somewhat over the top. His first words after were something along the lines of, “Wow, well with an introduction like that I guess I should run for President!”

Don’t worry; I am pretty sure it was not a boisterous introduction on a high school stage that gave him that particular idea. But then again, who knows?