Sunday, August 31, 2008

Fact-challenged Joe Biden

If I hear the word "hard-scrabble" again in reference to Joe Biden I'm going to... well, laugh probably. Read this Steve Chapman piece, excerpts follow:

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, "he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg."

It went on, "Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island." Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden "worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales."

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

And it gets better....

Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had "died and gone to Yale." He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.

OK, so he wasn't rich, but hardly underprivileged in the normal use of the term. So... why so serious, Joe, about the insistence on mythical blue-collar roots?

So where did he get his working-class reputation? Partly it comes from Biden's streetwise demeanor and his preoccupation with the fact that his family wasn't as well-off as some of the people he knew -- which seems to have given him a permanent chip on his shoulder.

Oh, well that more than explains it. Sounds like Joe's ready for a green-collar job, as in green with envy. As I've quoted Mr. Morrisey in regards to that verdantly-colored fault previously, "we hate it when our friends become successful."

2 comments:

  1. I grew up in a southeastern PA suburb of Philly in the 1970s, a little over 15 miles from Archmere. From that perspective, Archmere was as posh as it got.

    (Which isn't to say some of the other prep schools in the area weren't higher ranked by some; I wouldn't know (my father was a mere university professor, so such things were beyond us). But if you're talking Catholic schools that accepted boys, fuhgedaboudit.)

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  2. Does he really have hair plugs? Oy...

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