While Biden suggests the press misread his ideological bent, he never shied away from the Irish Catholic part. “The reporters were sure I was a liberal.”

“The Washington press corps ushered me to town as a kind of poor Kennedy cousin: I was Irish, Catholic, young, toothsome,” he recalls of his early Senate days in his 2007 memoir. Press accounts of his family-run 1972 Senate campaign seized on it to highlight the similarities to John Kennedy’s own family-filled Senate bid 20 years earlier.įor the press, the deaths of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi, in a car crash just a month after his upset ’72 win, only made the comparison to the tragedy-scarred Kennedy clan all the more irresistible. And that side of the family has a more complicated legacy.īiden’s Irish Catholicism was integral to his political brand from the start. While Biden embraces his Irish roots, the rest of his family tree rarely comes up. “And Irish Americans have been an important manifestation of that image from the beginning of the republic.”īut that’s only half the story of Biden’s heritage - or, more precisely, five-eighths of it.

“He kind of embodies the American common man,” Meagher said. Throughout, it has helped him bolster a personal brand built on Average Joe relatability. Later, it helped Biden serve as a bridge to Irish Americans and other white Catholics, who have drifted from the Democratic Party in recent decades. In a different era, it helped him channel a Kennedy mystique, when, as a young senator in the years after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, he was seen as an heir to Camelot. Biden has had plenty of reasons to lean into his Irish heritage over the years.

Iron Five by Seon O. Stronghold