Campaigning in Virginia coal country, Joe Biden actually described himself as “a coal miner” from the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region.
In his first visit to Southwest Virginia, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, speaking at the United Mine Workers’ annual fish fry here on Saturday, was quick to tout his ties to coal.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,†Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. … It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia] … but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.â€
Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware, told the story of his great-grandfather, a mining engineer who was elected to the state Senate in 1904 and was rumored to be a Molly Maguire, a member of a secret organization tied to union activism and crime in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 19th century.
“He went out of his way to prove that he wasn’t, and we were all praying that he was,†he said.
The mines closed when Joe Biden and I were kids. Biden obviously was never a coal miner personally. Still, those of us from miner’s families do identify with a certain kind of culture and tradition, and consider ourselves connected to our father’s and grandfathers’ lives of hardship, danger, and hard labor.
Joe Biden moved from Scranton to the Delaware suburbs at the age of ten. Biden campaigns on his purported coal mining, Roman Catholic roots, but his politics have always been upper middle class suburban liberal.
I haven’t read Biden’s autobiography, but Ann Coulter has, and she reports that Biden tells a very different story there.
According to Vice Plagiarist Biden’s own autobiography, his father was to the manor born. Biden’s grandfather was an executive with the American Oil Co., and his father had all the advantages in life. “My dad,” Biden writes in “Promises to Keep,” “grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps.”
wes207
I have read Joe Biden’s autobiography, and it’s too bad Ann Coulter did not continue her reading. She would have learned that Biden’s father spent his summers with wealthy cousins who endowed him with those “gentlemanly pursuits.”
That same family of relatives gave him a job after he was married, but Mr. Biden was unsuccessful at his own furniture and crop-dusting businesses. Joe Biden writes that by 1947 when he was starting school, “we were back in Scranton — and broke.”
His father cleaned boilers for a living while they lived with Joe’s grandparents, and when they moved to Delaware, it was to an apartment and his dad worked at a car dealership. He quit that job in protest over the owner’s treatment of employees.
Biden attended the private Archmere School on a work-study program because his parents couldn’t afford the $300 per year tuition. His upbringing may have been luxurious compared to Barack Obama’s, but it was hardly “upper middle class” by any other standard.
Kilo
Biden was never a coal miner yet he said
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,â€
I would call that statement a lie, a bold faced pandering lie.
Brenda Sheets
It just seems strange to me that people pick out just enough words to harm others without regard to the “whole picture.” It is, therefore, for this reason I do not listen to comments made by anyone. I look at where politicians stand on issues that concern me. There is one thing I do know, Biden’s voting record is better for me that the republican voting record!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you!
Rhonda
It doesn’t matter what the book went on to say, Biden was NOT a coal miner. To claim being a coal miner, or from a mining family, is pure belittlement to those of us who truly are from a mining family and background. I take it very personally because although I am not a coal miner, my father was, my brother is, and most of my family are, and I know what the miners give up, I know the risks they take. I have been on the bad end of phone call saying there has been a mining accident. If you haven’t been there, then you don’t know!!!!
Nita Bucklen
I am the daughter of a coal miner from Wv, my Dad worked under the ground and got black lung. Joe Biden is am habitual liar and can’t be trusted.
JDZ
I’m the son of a coal miner from Pennsylvania. My father also had Anthrosilicosis. And I agree that Joe Bidem is an outrageous liar and plagiarist.
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