Biden's Remarks During a 1987 Debate, for Which he Was Accused of Plagiarizing a British Politician

Biden announced he was dropping out of the race on Sept. 24, 1987. (To make things even, Biden later jokingly gave Kinnock some of his speeches to use “with or without attribution” during a January 1988 trip to Europe.) About twenty years later, in his 2008 memoir Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, he wrote that the plagiarism scandal was his own fault. “When I stopped trying to explain to everybody and thought it through, the blame fell totally on me,” he wrote. “Maybe the reporters traveling with me had seen me credit Kinnock over and over, but it was Joe Biden who forgot to credit Kinnock at the State Fair debate.”