New Yorker writer George Packer’s 2013 book, “The Unwinding,” tells the story of the modern United States through the eyes of a few Americans — including Jeff Connaughton, who worked as a lawyer, a lobbyist and a Wall Street banker. But he was always a “Biden guy,” drifting back to work for Vice President Joe Biden’s campaigns over the decades. Connaughton first met Biden in 1979, when the business student invited the then-senator to speak at the University of Alabama. In the wake of this week’s revelation that Biden himself leaked that his dying son, Beau, urged him to run for president again, here’s an excerpt of Connaughton’s impression of the candidate.



In 1987, Jeff Connaughton landed a junior staff job on the Biden for President campaign, at $24,000 a year. He worked under Ted Kaufman, Biden’s veteran chief of staff, an El Greco beanpole with an elongated jaw and a dome of curly hair. Kaufman stood in the innermost Biden circle, and when the senator’s sister, Valerie, introduced Kaufman to Jeff, she said, “You’re lucky to be working for Ted — he’s so close to Joe he doesn’t have to worry.”

Connaughton wished he’d had the presence of mind to ask, “Do people worry? Could you please elaborate on that in a couple of paragraphs?” The implication was pretty clear: “You, on the other hand, ought to be really worried because you don’t have any kind of relationship with Biden, and Bidenland is strewn with mines, some marked, others not.”

Kaufman and Connaughton hit it off. They were both MBAs and decided to run the fundraising operation like a company.

After Gary Hart was caught fooling around with Donna Rice on board the yacht Monkey Business and became the year’s first victim of scandal and media frenzy, Biden became a strong contender for the nomination. Connaughton worked all day at his desk in the giant blue-carpeted room, took no breaks, drove back to Alexandria, Va., at midnight, fell into bed exhausted, then woke up in the morning and headed back to Wilmington, Del., to do it again, thinking: “I am living my purpose right now.”

Connaughton rose through the ranks, putting together $50,000 fund-raisers with trial lawyers and the Jewish community in southern cities. He started traveling with the candidate, and if the plane was delayed, or if Biden talked too long or not long enough, Connaughton caught flak from donors. He and Biden never spoke.

One day, on a flight to a fundraiser in Houston, Connaughton was told to brief Biden about the event. He carried the briefing book up the aisle to the first-class cabin where Biden was sitting with his wife, Jill.

“Senator, can I speak to you for a minute?” Connaughton asked.

“Just gimme what you got,” Biden said, hardly looking up.

Biden apparently didn’t remember Alabama. Long after Connaughton went to work for him, his boss would butcher the original connection, saying, “I’m glad I met you when you were in law school all those years ago.”

Biden always had time for strangers, especially if they bore any relation to Delaware. If you were family, or part of a small circle of long-serving aides, like Kaufman, and you “bled Biden blue,” as the senator liked to say, then he was intensely loyal.

Dumb f–k over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed. - Joe Biden

But if you just worked your ass off for him for a few years, he ignored you, intimidated you, sometimes humiliated you, took no interest in your advancement, and never learned your name.

“Hey, Chief,” he’d say, or “How’s it going, Cap’n,” unless he was ticked at you, in which case he’d employ one of his favorite terms for male underlings: “dumb f–k.”

“Dumb f–k over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed.” It was both noun and adjective: “Is the event leader a Democrat or a Republican? Or are you too dumb f–k to know?”

Connaughton was doing the hard, thankless, essential work of soliciting money, and for this he was forever stigmatized, because Biden hated fund-raising, the drudgery and compromises it entailed.

He resented any demands placed on him by the people who helped him raise money and the people who wrote checks, as if he couldn’t stand owing them. He didn’t hang out with the permanent class in Washington, but left his Capitol office every evening, walked across Massachusetts Avenue to Union Station and took Amtrak home to his family in Wilmington.

Remaining Ordinary Joe became a point of aggressive pride. He was as incorruptible as he was ungrateful.

In early September, Connaughton took a break from the campaign to attend the Alabama-Penn State game. He was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside when a news bulletin came on the radio station: Biden, at a debate in Iowa, had plagiarized a speech by a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock, even stealing Kinnock’s identity as a descendant of coal miners.

As an isolated case, it would have been a story without legs. But having already brought down Hart, the media — Maureen Dowd and E.J. Dionne in the Times, Eleanor Clift in Newsweek — smelled another scandal and they competed to dig up other Biden faults: lines lifted from Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy; a badly footnoted law-school essay that resulted in a failing grade; exaggerated claims about his past.

Then an incident recorded by C-SPAN in a New Hampshire resident’s kitchen surfaced. Biden had agreed to wear a mike for an entire, unedited campaign event — a first in political history. He was brilliant for 89 of the 90 minutes, but he had spent his whole career saying too much, and just before the end, a voter asked him about his law-school grades. Biden snapped, “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” then made at least three false statements about his education while taking the guy’s head off.

Connaughton hadn’t heard of the Kinnock speech or how Biden was using it. Honestly, he didn’t care much for Biden’s stump speech, which always brought down the house with the line, “Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.”

Connaughton revered the Kennedys as much as anyone, but that line left him flat — it was overwrought, and pitched at Americans a decade or more older.

Why couldn’t Biden give substantive speeches, with issues and facts and solutions? He seemed to be running for president on his ability to move people. Move them to do what? He was trying to sound like the murdered heroes themselves.

The Kennedys quoted the Greeks, pundits said, and Biden quoted the Kennedys. Sometimes without attribution.

Excerpted from “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America” by George Packer. Copyright © 2013 by George Packer. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.