Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Delaware, there was Joseph Biden—who, after his 1972 Senate election at the age of twenty-nine as a liberal, became the senator from outside the deep South who did the most to stymie busing to achieve school desegregation, and pioneered the imposition of mandatory sentences for federal crimes. (He said drug dealers were “potential killers” who should be tracked down “like we track down killers.”) He boasted in full-page ads that he was “one of the stingiest senators”—the sixth most conservative, according to the National Taxpayers Union (having long ago reversed his previous conviction that balancing the budget “would have a minimal effect on inflation while potentially worsening the economy”). He voted against Humphrey-Hawkins and for the capital gains tax cut of his Delaware colleague William Roth, whom he outflanked from the right with an even more stringent bill to sunset federal programs if they were not specifically reauthorized. He even won Howard Jarvis’s endorsement (“You have shown yourself to be in the forefront of the battle to reduce government spending”). He glided to reelection. As,