Long, long ago (in a galaxy not nearly far enough away), someone must have imparted to Joe Biden the wisdom that connecting with constituents and securing their votes (at least legally) requires relatability. It’s evident virtually every time the president addresses an audience that he believes persuading them he’s “one of them” is the key to winning them over. Thus, we’re treated to “Joey from Scranton,” the first Oval Office occupant “who was a black, Puerto Rican, Polish, civil rights activist truck driver who challenged Corn Pop to a duel while going to shul and black churches.”
And our ethnic chameleon commander-in-chief loves to regale his audiences with stories from his younger days and lessons learned from his parents and grandparents. What apparently never occurred to Biden was that storytelling only makes one relatable when the tales one tells aren’t verifiably false — on the regular. And yet, so often, they are. Whether it’s his often-trotted-out fabrication about his Amtrak buddy Angelo Negri or the 17,000 miles he claims he traveled with Chinese President Xi Jinping (the one that earned him Three Pinocchios from WaPo’s Glenn Kessler), Biden continuously resorts to fibbing and for no apparent reason other than he seems to believe it earns him cool points.
Tuesday, the day he announced his 2024 bid for re-election, was no different from any other in that regard. Addressing the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) Legislative Conference, Biden invoked the memory of his paternal grandfather, an oil businessman who (purportedly) was tasked with opening up gas stations in the 20s and 30s. According to Joe:
My grandpop, who I never met — he died in the same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born.
Joe Biden lies about being born in the same hospital that his grandfather died in just two weeks prior.
Biden was born in Pennsylvania. His grandfather died in Maryland almost an entire year earlier. pic.twitter.com/6uU3Yp8Abc
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 25, 2023
One problem with that: Biden’s grandfather, Joseph Harry Biden, died in September 1941, in Baltimore, Maryland. President Biden was born in November 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, some 14 months later and 200-plus miles away. So, unless there was a rift in the space-time continuum, Biden has rolled out yet another tall tale — and again, for no apparent reason. Neither the timing of his grandfather’s death nor the location had a thing to do with the remainder of his story:
But my grandpop was from — as they say in Maryland — from Baltimore. (Pronounced in Baltimore accent.) (Laughter.) And he worked for the American Oil Company. And his job was to open up new gas stations around the country back in the late — of the ‘20s and ‘30s.
And guess what? People didn’t want those gas stations because they didn’t want all those “How many thousand gallons of oil are sitti- — gasoline are sitting below the surface of my neighborhood?” They were worried about.
But once the gas station was built, what happens? You end up having a drugstore. You end up having a coffee shop. You end up having — it generates growth.
(And lest anyone wonder whether he might have meant his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, first a civil engineer, then an ad salesman for a Scranton newspaper, was still living until Joe Biden was in his teens.)
So, for no apparent reason, Joe Biden felt the need to lie about the timing and location of his grandfather’s death. Or, maybe he just calculated it wrong. After all, if Hunter’s the smartest guy he knows, maybe he’s not so hot at math either.
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