Joe Biden Gets Dates Wrong Again at Campaign Event

Joe Biden Gets Dates Wrong Again at Campaign Event
Democratic 2020 presidential candidate former Vice Presideht Joe Biden addresses the Presidential Forum at the NAACP's 110th National Convention at Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan, on July 24, 2019. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Zachary Stieber
Updated:

Former Vice President Joe Biden got his facts wrong while speaking in public, the latest in a string of such errors.

Biden, speaking at a campaign stop in Iowa on Aug. 20, said: “Just like in my generation, when I got out of school, when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the ‘70s, the late ’70s when I got engaged.”

He soon added that “it was a time in the early, late ‘60s.”

“Up until that time—remember—none of you women would know this, but a couple of men may remember—that was a time in the early and late sixties and early sixties and sixties where it was ‘drop out. Go to Haight Ashbury, don’t get engaged, don’t trust anyone over 30,’” Biden said.

The clip was highlighted by the GOP War Room as GOP national spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington wrote on Twitter: “They can’t take him anywhere.”

Bobby Kennedy, or Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated on June 6, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Biden has struggled with dates, places, and other facts while speaking recently, while also making other statements described in some media outlets as “gaffes.”

In early August, Biden mixed up the locations of the recent mass shootings, which took place El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, saying they happened in Houston and Michigan.

At the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 8, Biden told a crowd, “we choose truth over facts,” and later in the day told people at a campaign event that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” He also insisted that President Donald Trump didn’t condemn neo-Nazis in 2017 despite video evidence showing Trump did.
On Aug. 9, Biden confused Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher for the second time this year.
Several days later, Biden claimed he was vice president when he met with survivors of the Parkland mass shooting despite leaving office in 2017, over a year before the shooting took place. He later defended himself, saying he “was still called vice president” when he met with the survivors.

He added that “they asked me to come speak to them in the rotunda. I think it was the rotunda, it was one of the buildings, or one of the rooms in the Capitol.”

Last week, Biden said he was in Burlington, Vermont, for a speech when he had spoken in Burlington, Iowa.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Des Moines Register Soapbox during a visit to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa on Aug. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Des Moines Register Soapbox during a visit to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa on Aug. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One in Morristown, N.J., on Aug. 18, 2019. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One in Morristown, N.J., on Aug. 18, 2019. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump has jabbed Biden over the errors, saying he’s “not playing with a full deck” after the “poor kids” one.

“This is not somebody you can have as your president, but if he got the nomination, I’d be thrilled,” he told reporters. “Joe Biden can’t answer a simple question; something’s gone wrong with him.”

Meanwhile, Biden’s team has defended their candidate.

Spokeswoman Symone Sanders said during an appearance on CNN: “This is a press narrative, not a voter narrative. If you were to look at the coverage in Iowa this weekend and juxtapose the local newspapers and local television coverage to national media coverage you would have thought these reporters were at two different events.”
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