Biden, chief storyteller, weaves threads that often unravel, drawing criticism

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BY MICHAEL D. SHEAR AND LINDA QIUNEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON In front of Floridians who had lost everything during Hurricane Ian, President Biden recalled Wednesday that his own house had been almost destroyed 15 years ago: “We did not lose our whole house, but the lightning struck hit and we lost an awful lot,” he said.

Biden has mentioned the incident before, once saying he knew what it was like “to have a house burnt down with my wife in it.”

In fact, news reports at the time called it little more than a “small contained fire in the kitchen” and quoted the local Delaware fire chief as saying “the fire was under control within 20 minutes.”

History is not an isolated example of embellishment.

The exaggerated biography that Biden recounts includes being a fierce civil rights activist who was arrested multiple times. He claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he was “raised in the Puerto Rican community back home, politically”.

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For more than four decades, Biden has embraced storytelling as a way to connect with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his story by adding, “Not kidding!” in the middle of a story. But Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details exaggerated or wrong, with factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.

Biden’s examples of exaggeration and lying fall far short of those of his predecessor, who for four years in office delivered what the Washington Post fact checker called a “tsunami of untruths” and CNN reported. described as a “staggering avalanche of daily mistakes”.

Former President Donald Trump consistently lied, not just about trivial details (like insisting it didn’t rain during his inauguration when he clearly did), but about back-to-back moments. deceivers about the pandemic, perpetuating the “big lie” that Biden stole the 2020 election and falsely claiming that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Biden’s fictions are far from this magnitude . But they are emblematic of how the president, in nearly five decades in public life, has been unable to shake off the habit of telling embellished narratives, sometimes only vaguely based on fact. , to weave its political identity. And they’re providing political ammunition for Republicans willing to deem him too weak to run for re-election in two years.

His stories have been repeatedly and publicly challenged, as far back as his 1987 presidential campaign, when his attempts to adopt someone else’s life story as his own and his false claims about his school record the forced to withdraw.

White House officials took issue with Biden’s characterization as a serial exaggerator and pointed to contrast with his predecessor.

“President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. “As he promised, he gives truth to the American people and takes pride in being candid with the country about its agenda and values, including sharing life experiences that have shaped its outlook and people who work hard identify with.”

But ethicists have said contrasting with Trump does not excuse Biden.

“I worry about the corrosive effects on democracy, of making ‘more honest than Donald Trump’ the norm for politicians,” said Michael Blake, professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington. .

Two days before his remarks in Fort Myers, Fla., Biden made his comments about the Puerto Rican community at his home in Delaware as he toured the island’s destruction.

I am one of you, he seemed to say.

But Biden made no mention of Puerto Rico in any of his biographies. Officials could not point to specific instances where Biden had worked on issues involving the island, although Ted Kaufman, Biden’s former chief of staff, defended the description of his close friend, saying Biden s Was personally involved with the Puerto Ricans early in his career, similarly. he had with other groups, such as black or Jewish communities.

Biden’s critics have seized on his lies to portray him as either a willful liar or a forgetful old man.

“When you lie about big things, you lie about small things,” Greg Kelly, a host of the conservative Newsmax network, said this year, “and always in a political sense, always with the goal of getting people to ‘loving, and exaggerating along the way.”

Biden has delivered exaggerations at least as far back as his first presidential campaign.

In his first presidential run in 1987, Biden said he “went to law school on a full scholarship,” boasted he “finished in the top half” of his law school class. law and insisted that he “had obtained three undergraduate degrees”. school.”

In fact, as he later admitted, he had only a partial scholarship, was 76th out of 85 law students, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree (with a double major in history and political science).

Perhaps the most curious stories Biden continues to tell are those of his interactions with the law. Earlier this year, Biden suggested during a speech in Atlanta on voting rights that he was arrested while demonstrating for civil rights.

“Because I’m so old, I was there too,” he said. “You think I’m kidding, man. It feels like yesterday the first time I got arrested.”

There is no evidence that he was ever arrested during a civil rights demonstration.

During the 2020 campaign, he said he was arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He later admitted that he had been prevented from moving by the police but had not been arrested.

In 2008, he said he was arrested as a student following a group of women into a female-only dormitory. He hadn’t, as he admitted years later. In 2007, he recounted being arrested by a Capitol Police officer as a 21-year-old college student in 1963. But in his memoir, he wrote that the officer “didn’t arrest me or anything. either”.

Blake suggested there could be a cumulative effect even if Biden had apologies and explanations for individual instances of inaccuracy.

“It’s an attempt to kind of create a picture of who he is as someone who has empathy, knowledge, and connection to people who aren’t like him,” Blake said.

“But the problem is,” he added, “when it’s a verifiable fake story, then trust that story, it fails.”

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