At the height of the Watergate scandal, Joe Biden said Democrats were “more immoral” than Republicans.
“Let me say for the record clearly, clearly Democrats are as immoral as Republicans, if not more immoral in some of the big cities, a great deal more immoral in the traditional sense,” the 30-year-old Delaware senator said at the City Club of Cleveland in Ohio, which released an audio recording of the event this year. “But as a practical matter, politicians as a whole, in my opinion, having practicing law for four years, are a good deal more moral than lawyers as a whole, or doctors or businessmen.”
The future vice president made the comments in May 1973, months after the so-called Nixon tapes were released to the public, proving that President Richard Nixon had learned about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and oversaw a cover-up of the crimes.
Despite those revelations, Biden urged Democrats not to seize on the Watergate scandal as a campaign issue and boasted about how he “put on a 20-minute tirade” for attendees of a fundraiser in New Jersey about “the virtues of the Republican Party.”
He said, “For those of you who are active Democrats in the audience, who are too short-sighted to realize that the demise of the Republican Party means your own demise, that the demise of politicians and political parties means the demise of the system, then one of us is very stupid, either you or me, and I don’t think it’s me.”
Throughout his address, Biden defended the Republican Party and criticized Democrats who used the scandal as a central campaign message.
“Politicians happen to affect everything that affects you, as you are very well aware, and if we bring down a great political party that should not be blamed for what happened, we begin to bring down a system,” he said. “And if we bring down the system, unless you got something better to replace it with, we’re in trouble. And I for one don’t have anything better to replace it with.”
[WATCH: Climate protesters scream ‘2050 is too late’ at Joe Biden town hall]
