12 hours of mining, 4 hours of football 6
Sharp-eyed reader mesquito brought this item to my attention. This was way back in 1987 when Biden was making a run for president and gave a speech containing this pearl:
“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family to ever go to a university? Was it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.”
Somewhat incoherent, but, that's what you get. The real problem, though, was that the Labor Party's Neil Kinnock had given a speech earlier that year and said:
“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak, those people who worked eight hours underground and then come up and play football, weak? It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”
What's the Levenshtein distance on that one? Not much. And besides, it simply wasn't true. A strange episode, and it torpedoed Biden's candidacy.
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That was a much earlier use of the term “Levenshtein distance” than I would have predicted for a blog about Joe Biden.
“I was out in Ohio,” [Biden] said, clutching a football. “I told the folks in Ohio that [the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens football team]’d kick Ohio State’s ass!”
That’s from Jake Tapper’s “Oh, That Joe!” series, which is a terrific resource for your effort here.
Check last year’s debate transcript. He said something like “we spend six times more in Iraq in a month than we have in Afghanistan since 2001.” I’m sure there are other gems as well.
@bgates, thanks! I will research and use that as I get caught up. And yeah, next up, Joe Biden does Karp-Rabin string matching :-)
Thx. to a friend of mine who forwarded the link for this site. Slow Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. Only one problem he’s the clown that is “a heartbeat away from the Presidency” Now that is no laughing matter - actually pretty scary to think that if he ever becomes the POTUS it will be …LIVE FROM WASHINGTON, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT. All skits will be based on Bidenisms. We should get Dan Quayle to produce the program. Keep those one liners coming Joe! You are truly a boob of Homeric dimension and breadth.
The thing that always gets me about this one is the “football” line. Obviously Kinnock had been referring to English football: His predecessors would work all day then go play soccer, presumably for their pub teams and such. A very common scenario in working-class England.
Biden just straight-up lifts the line, which for an American audience, of course, translates into American gridiron football. Given that our gridiron football isn’t exactly a common adult recreational sport, it just makes the whole fib that much more… fibby.
Now, did his ancestors toss around a pigskin in the backyard once in a while? Maybe. (Though Biden’s age makes it more likely it would have been a baseball, if anything.) But the likeliest situation is that on top of being a clumsy plagiarist, Biden is just a clumsy liar too.
A thousand generations didn’t go to university? Well, universities have only been around for 500 years or so, which might explain a few of those generations.
Mike, thinking of Dan Quayle to host it is a stroke of genius. I would love to see that happen.