I just attended a company picnic with a guy who is on the board of Syracuse University. He said that Biden went to law school there and was nearly kicked out for plagiarism. From Wikipedia:
Then in September 1987, the campaign ran into serious trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, then-leader of the British Labour Party.[26] Though Biden had correctly credited the original author in all speeches but one, the one where he failed to make mention of the originator was caught on video; the New York Times reported "Senator Biden began his remarks by saying the ideas had come to him spontaneously on the way to the debate."[26][27]
Within days, it was also discovered that as a first-year law student at Syracuse Law School, Biden had plagiarized a law review article in a class paper he wrote. Though the dean of the law school in 1988 as well as Biden's former professor played down the incident of plagiarism, they did find that Biden drew "chunks of heavy legal prose directly from" the article in question. Biden said the act was inadvertent due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, and Biden was permitted to retake the course after receiving a grade of F, which was subsequently dropped from his record.
I guess Obama thinks that Biden's foreign policy experience outweighs all of this.
