HOW COULD HE STOP IT? His campaign was hemorrhaging. Ridley was near emotional collapse. The gurus were clueless. Joe sent Val up to sniff the wind in New Hampshire, whence she fired back a telegram: THE PEOPLE ARE WITH YOU. VICTORY IS YOURS. But that was just Val, being a Biden. They both knew that. No less a savant that R. W. Apple, in The New York Times, was beating the tribal drums under the headline: BIDEN’S WATERLOO? (And who was Apple’s featured Washington wise guy, helping to drop the dime on Joe? “What’s clearly revealed here is that his intellectual habits are lazy, undisciplined and sloppy,” said Apple’s “campaign expert,” the pilgarlic-pollster-pundit-columnist-TV-guest-part-time-Biden-guru-who-gave -Joe-the-Kinnock-tape-in-the-first-place, William Schneider. “That’s a major weakness, and it will seriously damage him.”) Worse, the papers were starting to speculate on whether Biden’s woes would catapult Bork onto the Court. Joe couldn’t let that happen.
