Joe Biden “don’t know much about history.”

September 23rd, 2008 at 02:40pm Chuck Sweeny

Joe Biden, the foot-in-mouth vice presidential nominee for the Democrats, has been a one-man faux-pas machine throuhgout much of his career, so it’s odd that Barry O picked him for the veep spot. The latest, according to Ben Smith in Politico,

Here’s the post directly from Politico:

Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

As Reason’s Jesse Walker footnotes it: “And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, ‘Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?’”

OK, Chuck here again. For all of you history challenged blog readers, I’ll explain. Republican Herbert Hoover was president when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and took over in April 1933.

At that time, the only television sets that existed were in laboratories. Read a short history of TV here   .

The first U.S. license for a television station was issued in 1928 by the FCC to  (W3XK) to Charles Jenkins.  But only fellow scientists and inventors would have been able to watch. Television didn’t become commonplace until the late 1940s in big cities, and the mid-1950s in smaller cities like Rockford.

What Biden was talking about was Roosevelt’s practice during the 1930s and 1940s of talking directly to Americans in their homes, on the RADIO. They were called “fireside chats.”

Entry Filed under: invention of TV, Biden