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Sounds canned?

Here was tragedy, here was energy, here was oratory—just like the Kennedys. When they arrived at the airport, Connaughton produced a spiral notebook, and Biden signed it: “Please stay involved in politics. We need you all.” At that moment, Connaughton felt certain that he would end up following this man to the White House.

Before graduating, he invited Biden to Alabama twice more for speeches. The last time that he dropped Biden off at the Birmingham airport, he made a promise: “If you ever run for President, I’m going to be there.”

Connaughton didn’t immediately head to Washington. First, he went to the University of Chicago business school. (Biden had written a letter of recommendation.) It was 1981, and Time ran an article, called “The Money Chase,” about the vogue for M.B.A.s; the cover image showed a graduating student whose mortarboard had a tassel made of dollars. Connaughton, the son of a government engineer and a homemaker, had never had money, and Wall Street’s allure was almost as strong as that of the White House.

For two years, he worked at Smith Barney—first in Manhattan, then in Chicago. In 1985, missing the South, he passed up a large bonus and joined the E. F. Hutton office in Atlanta. Several months later, the firm pleaded guilty to two thousand counts of wire and mail fraud. In Washington, Joe Biden, who was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began talking on TV about the epidemic of white-collar crime on Wall Street and the failure of the Reagan Justice Department to police it. In a speech at N.Y.U., Biden said, “People believe that our system of law and those who manage it have failed, and may not even have tried, to deal effectively with unethical and possibly illegal misconduct in high places.” He was getting set for the big race.