At Least He Gives of Himself

THE SCRAPBOOK's heart goes out to Joe Biden. He's about to be raked over the coals by the media for his level of charitable giving, just as Dick Cheney was eight years ago.

Cheney, you may recall, was criticized for being "meager" and less than generous with his gifts. Over a 10-year period, the Cheneys had donated an average of just 2.14 percent of their income to charity. Adam "Big Time" Clymer of the New York Times, noting that Cheney was a multimillionaire, asked him at the time, "What do you think is a proper level of giving for someone who has millions of dollars, in terms of percentage?" Cheney replied: "I think that's a choice that individuals have to make in terms of what they want to do with their resources. It's not a policy question. It's a private matter. It's a matter of private choice."

THE SCRAPBOOK agrees. If you will indulge us, we will repeat here what we said in September 2000:

"THE SCRAPBOOK considers it an appalling invasion of privacy, not to mention an invitation to the worst sort of Tartuffery, that we require our political leaders to disclose their charitable giving in their tax forms. But given that we do, last week's anti-Cheney frenzy in the press was amazingly onesided. In our Nexis search, only four of the 162 stories we turned up mentioned the Gores' embarrassing 1997 tax returns, which showed a total of $353 in giving from an income of

Given how harshly the media judged the Cheneys, you can well imagine what the Bidens are now in for. Because a decade's worth of their tax returns, made public by the Obama-Biden campaign on September 12, showed that they reported giving less than two-tenths of one percent of their income to charity.

As Paul L. Caron noted at the TaxProf Blog (from which we drew the figures for the chart here), "It is jarring that a couple earning over $200,000 per year would give as little as $2 per week to charity. This giving compares very unfavorably to John McCain, whose tax returns show that he gave 27.3%-28.6% of his income to charity in 2006-2007. During the same period, the Obamas' tax returns show that they gave 5.8%-6.1% of their income to charity."

A Biden spokesman pointed out that he and his wife "do volunteer work with military families." And, we would add, Biden has made a gift of himself to his country. Who can put a dollar figure on that? If you're keeping score at home, the Bidens' rate of giving is one-tenth that of the Cheneys. So you can imagine how the reporters are going to dog the senator from Delaware in the coming days. As we go to press, the New York Times hasn't yet turned its big guns on the good ship Biden, but we're sure it's only a matter of time.

Good Grief

Now that Barack Obama has been shown to be vulnerable, THE SCRAPBOOK is ready to dust off one of its favorite political theories: Namely, when Democratic presidential candidates sink in the polls, their supporters undergo a psychic process not unlike Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's famous "five stages of grief."