Joe Biden is not the first person in his family to have gone to college. But he has a lengthy history of claiming otherwise, no matter how much the lie gets him in trouble.
Even after having famously admitted exactly 33 years ago to the day that he had family who had gone to college before him, Biden once again made the false claim at a CNN Town Hall on Thursday night.
Biden enthusiast Charlotte Alter, a national correspondent at Time magazine, tweeted out his line, apparently unaware of its role in Biden’s 1987 presidential campaign collapse:
Back in 1987, The New York Times published Biden’s quote admitting that was not true:
In addition, Mr. Biden said … he had miscast some of his own forebears, painting them as having rather more humble origins than they in fact did. For example, borrowing Mr. Kinnock’s sentiments, Mr. Biden had said he was ‘the first in his family ever to go to university.’ In fact, Mr. Biden said today, ‘there are Finnegans, my mother’s family, that went to college.’
Among others, his great-grandfather attended college at a time in which fewer than 2 percent of college-aged men and women in the United States did so. Now it’s around 60 percent.