"This lack of personal involvement in the struggle did not stop Biden, when he was seeking national office, from inventing a civil rights past for himself."

"[Richard Ben Cramer, in his classic account of the 1988 presidential primaries, What It Takes,] reported on his rhetoric in the primaries in 1988: 'Joe was off on his life… how he started in the civil rights movement…remember?… The marches? Remember how that felt?… And they’re nodding in the crowd, and he’s got them, sure.' Even when his handlers warned him to stop saying this because it was not true, he couldn’t help himself: 'Folks, when I started in public life, in the civil rights movement, we marched to change attitudes.' The plain fact, as [Biden’s biographer Jules] Witcover notes, is that 'he avoided street protest or anything else that smacked of civil disobedience.' He was a concerned observer of, not a participant in, the great dramas of the 1960s. So how could Biden imagine himself as the reincarnation of the Kennedys? Those two words: Irish Catholic. His claim to that legacy is not experiential or particularly ideological. It is ethnic and religious. The Kennedys defined an Irish-American Catholic political identity—white (even in their case conspicuously privileged), yet by virtue of the grimness of Irish history and the outsider status of Catholics, supposedly not guilty of the grave crimes of racial oppression. Its promise was to act as the bridge across the great divide of US society, being mainstream enough to connect to the white majority but with a sufficient memory of past torment to connect also to the black minority. Its underlying appeal was to the very thing that Biden would come to embody—'a sense of the depth of their pain' rooted in 'vivid memories of sad times.' This is what Biden chose when he defined himself as he has throughout his public career: 'I see myself as an Irish Catholic.' And this was indeed a choice. Biden is not an Irish name.... So Biden could have presented himself, had he chosen, as an all-American boy. Instead he identified with his mother’s ethnic ancestry...."

From "The Designated Mourner" by Fintan O’Toole (in The New York Review of Books)(discussing Joe Biden's memoir, "Promise Me, Dad").