For some, exaggerations litter the campaign trail
Joe Biden at his campaign rally Monday in Charleston, S.C. Credit: EPA / Jim Lo Scalzo
Former Vice President Joe Biden's slippery recitations of his own biography got new exposure this week with the quick unraveling of one of his recent campaign-trail tales.
Biden spoke of having been arrested in South Africa trying to visit the jailed anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela.
"I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robbens [sic] Island," Biden said Monday in South Carolina.
For starters, the place named Robben Island sits nearly 800 miles from Soweto.
And while Biden helped enact sanctions decades ago on companies doing business in South Africa during the apartheid, former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young told The Washington Post: “There is no chance I ever was arrested in South Africa, and I don’t think Joe was, either."
Biden's apparent invention sounded a bit like the one Sen. Hillary Clinton blurted out during the presidential primaries in 2008. Clinton claimed to have arrived for a gathering in Bosnia under sniper fire, which she didn't. It became a big fiasco.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has drawn fire for exaggerating for reputational use the degree to which she may have had Native American ancestry. Her released DNA report cited “strong evidence” she had a Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago.
All these instances, of course, add up to politicians attempting to puff themselves up.
Most observers agree that President Donald Trump also has sought to make himself sound smarter or tougher or more accomplished than he often demonstrates himself to be.
But Trump makes more of a splash when bearing false witness against others, such as saying Warren "doesn't have any Indian blood."
He was in this mode, for example, when he spoke of seeing Muslims celebrate the 9/11 attacks: "I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
Even his current lawyer Rudy Giuliani suggested at the time that Trump was "exaggerating."
"If thousands of people were demonstrating and he saw it on television, then there must be some tape of it somewhere. If it shows up, it will corroborate him. If it doesn't show up, it's going to make him look really bad," Giuliani said.
It didn't "show up," which did "make him look really bad," at least to those who object to contrived group blame.
But that didn't stop Trump from going lower by spasmodically mimicking a disabled reporter who'd quoted authorities that week as saying they were checking reports of some celebrating — but did not confirm the candidate's "sighting" of deplorable throngs.
Republican President Ronald Reagan, who even Democratic President Barack Obama saw as the "great communicator," also told fish stories. He once spoke of a "Chicago welfare queen," with rich details, who allegedly ripped off $150,000 while using 80 aliases. The woman he referred to apparently stole $8,000 with two aliases.
Reagan also claimed that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and his unit shot footage of Nazi concentration camps upon their liberation. He wasn't there. He spent the war years in Culver City, California, where he processed such footage.
False stories didn't keep him from winning a landslide reelection and winning the adulation of a generation of Republicans.
Exaggeration differs, though, from lying while in office to deflect fallout from a controversial act:
"Third-rate burglary." "We did not trade arms for hostages." Saddam Hussein had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons. "I did not have sex with that woman." "It was a perfect phone call."
Fact-checking season will intensify with each of the campaign debates. By now it seems the candidates' goal is to seize positive attention and then let the chips, or the facts, fall where they may.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
