OPINION:
Democrats are calling for Rep.-elect George Santos to resign after he acknowledged “resume embellishment” in an interview. If that is the standard, then these same liberals should be calling on President Biden to resign from office. Don’t hold your breath.
During his first failed run for president in 1987, then-Sen. Biden was caught on C-SPAN mouthing off to a voter in New Hampshire during a campaign stop. After the person questioned his academic record, Mr. Biden said: “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class who had a full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class.”
Mr. Biden also claimed that he “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” And, in typical Biden fashion, he got cocky with the voter, saying, “I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like, Frank.”
As PolitiFact noted: “Biden graduated from Syracuse University’s law school in 1968, but not in the top half of his class. He also did not receive three undergraduate degrees. And, according to a Newsweek report, Mr. Biden didn’t attend law school on a full academic scholarship, either.”
The report noted that Mr. Biden attended Syracuse on a half scholarship based on financial need. He graduated 76th of 86 students in his law school class. Even the new math doesn’t put that in the top half of his class.
It was one of several lies he told during his first run for president. Maureen Dowd wrote about Mr. Biden’s plagiarism of numerous speeches, including one by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock decades ago: “So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 — without crediting Mr. Kinnock.” In 1987, the growing evidence of Mr. Biden’s “resume embellishment” was too much for him to overcome, and he dropped out of the race.
A normal person would likely learn from these obvious lapses in judgment. Instead, Mr. Biden continues to lie about his past. Earlier this year, Mr. Biden went to Georgia to campaign against reasonable voter integrity laws and push for his own legislation to have the federal government take over elections from state and local officials. In his comments, he falsely claimed that he “got arrested” while protesting for civil rights.
PolitiFact wrote, “there is no evidence that Biden was actually arrested in the sense of being booked at a police station and facing any consequences in the criminal justice system. At times, Biden himself has described the police’s actions as driving him home, rather than putting him under arrest.” They rated his statement false.
At a 2020 campaign rally in Columbia, South Carolina, then-candidate Biden said: “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
PolitiFact rated his statement as a “Pants on Fire” lie. They wrote: “There is no evidence to prove that Biden was arrested in South Africa in the 1970s while trying to visit Mandela. Biden has since walked back his remarks to say that when he exited the airplane, officials tried to separate him from African American congressmen or detained him.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Biden told graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy that he was appointed to Annapolis by then-Sen. J. Caleb Boggs from Delaware. In his remarks, he said, “I was told the Class of ’72 is here. I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972 — never planned it that way. I wasn’t old enough to be sworn in. I was only 29 years old when I was running.”
The dates don’t add up, as 1965 is the same year that Mr. Biden graduated from the University of Delaware. The Naval Academy does not offer graduate degrees. Plus, there is no record of Boggs nominating Mr. Biden.
These are just a few of the many examples of Mr. Biden’s “resume embellishment” over the years. If Democrats want to push this standard for a newly elected member of Congress, they should apply it to the leader of their own party. Don’t count on it. As I’ve said before, if it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
• Scott Walker is president of Young America’s Foundation and served as the 45th governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019.
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