My Irish grandfather, James Patrick Corbett, emigrated to Scranton and worked the coal mines in Northeastern Pennsylvania for 45 years. After breathing decades of toxic coal dust, he died in 1966 from black lung disease. I recently passed down the bronzed carbide lamp he wore on his miner’s helmet to a fifth generation member of my family in our city.
I live in Scranton.
I’m Irish.
I’m a registered Democrat.
I’m also carrying a grudge.
Descendants of hard coal miners like me are still waiting for Scranton native and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to apologize for lying about his non-existent coal miner roots. Real descendants of hard coal mine workers don’t take kindly to the false valor Biden hoisted on the backs of our dead ancestors, men and boys who died in and out of the mines.
You thought we forgot, didn’t you, Joey?
My grandfather worked and risked his life daily underground in the black hell holes of anthracite. Biden, dubbed “the scrappy kid from Scranton” by President Barack Obama, told the world in 1988 that he, too, was the descendant of coal miners. That bold statement was Biden’s devious way to use others’ personal struggle and blood sacrifice of life and limb to build his own personal political advantage. Sadly, when Biden played us for fools, many people in hard coal country took the bait.
A few years later, Biden mocked us for falling for his vicious deceit.
Laughing, he seemed to take pride in his betrayal during a 2004 television interview with Jon Stewart. Speaking about the plagiarism scandal that sunk his first presidential run in 1988, Biden admitted to Stewart he did not have any coal miners in his family.
According to a VOX video and transcript, Biden made a full confession.
BIDEN: Look, everybody tells you “don’t take any chances,” because the truth of the matter is I’ve gotten myself in trouble. Hell, I might be president now if it weren’t for the fact I said I had an uncle who was a coal miner. Turns out I didn’t have anybody in the coal mines, y’know what I mean? I tried that crap — it didn’t work! [APPLAUSE] But I actually thought it!
STEWART: You believed it!
BIDEN: I actually believed it. I’m from Scranton, Pennsylvania, I figured there had to be a coal miner somewhere in the family.
STEWART: Nothing, huh?
BIDEN: Nothing! He was an engineer. We were Irish, y’know, and I thought the Welsh and English owned the deal, so we must be coal miners.
STEWART: You took a stab in the dark, huh.
BIDEN: I took a stab in the dark, and I found out he graduated from Lehigh. What can I say?
Try saying you’re sorry.
During that 1988 race, Biden ripped off the words of Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labour Party, stealing a Kinnock reference about how his ancestors worked in the coal mines, “and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.”
Kinnock’s family did work in the mines.
In 2008 Biden returned to the lie, romanticizing the coal myth, telling the United Mine Workers during their fish fry that he, like them, was a breed apart, a man of the mine.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania,” he said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia], but it’s the same deal.”
Working full-time as a Scranton-based news radio talk show host at the time, I refused to take Biden’s trickery any longer. Demanding an apology, my questions to the Obama/Biden campaign went unanswered. Finally, the state director of the Obama/Biden campaign eventually admitted Biden “might have misspoken.”
As Biden now fights desperation and skepticism in his last hurrah to win the Democratic presidential nomination, he continues to disrespect my hometown, the rugged little city he left at age ten. He flouts our mystique by calling it his own, falsely shaping himself in our image for his self-absorbed, opportunistic personal political advantage. Biden insults those of us in Northeastern Pennsylvania who do have family members who worked and often died and got maimed in that corporate machine where pack mules held more value than workers.
Why did Biden lie? Why did he laugh when telling Stewart the story about using gullible coal crackers to help himself to money, power and prestige, something Scranton’s miners never possessed? Why does Biden continue to use us while talking about noble character that shapes leadership? Why does Biden manipulate honorable people in Scranton and throughout the coal fields for his own benefit?
Because he wants to be something he is not.
Biden doesn’t know anything about the coal legacy that shapes our lives. We respect the truth of the present by refusing to lie about the past. Joe Biden doesn’t have an inkling about that kind of truth, the candor that builds character and is passed from generation to generation by people who respect each other and the struggles of honest hard-working people everywhere.
Joe Biden is just not one of us.