Biden highlights Kennedy Clan endorsement in lively Philadelphia speech, sprinkled with gaffes

PHILADELPHIA—President Joe Biden wrapped up his three-day tour of Pennsylvania on Thursday in an event featuring members of the Kennedy family, a sign of the Biden campaign’s growing nervousness about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party challenge.

Kerry Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s sister and ex-wife of disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo, introduced Biden at Philadelphia’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center. Kerry Kennedy announced that Biden had the endorsement of “nearly every single grandchild of Joe and Rose Kennedy,” and said Biden has gotten Americans “behaving like good neighbors again.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quixotic third-party bid for the presidency has prompted panic from the Biden campaign. Polls show Kennedy draws more votes from Biden than former president Donald Trump, who consistently leads in swing state polls. In response, the Democratic National Committee has created an entire department focused on attacking Kennedy.

That panic may explain why Biden gathered the Kennedys for a speech in Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state to which the family has no connection. Their presence at the event was overshadowed by the protesters who descended on the sparsely attended event, bombarding the roughly 100 audience members with calls for an “intifada” against Israel.

Biden spoke for less than 12 minutes on Thursday. During his remarks, he suffered a number of verbal stumbles and made several misleading, if not outright false, statements.

At one point, Biden said he sees “a future with a planet. We save the planet as this guy busting his neck doing, from climate change, literally,” in an apparent reference to a Kennedy relative’s work on environmental issues.

Biden boasted about how he “cut the budget by a lot of money, $172 billion so far, so don’t tell me it can’t be done.” It is not clear what Biden was referring to, as his latest budget proposes $7.3 trillion in spending and the 2023 deficit increased by $68 billion from the previous year.

Towards the end of his speech, Biden asked the audience whether they were “ready to choose freedom over democracy? Because that’s America.”

Biden also gave a moderated version of his political origin story, saying he decided to become a public defender at a young age “in a large part” because he thought it was something Robert Kennedy would want. Biden has previously said he left a private practice because he was so horrified by a case where a young welder burned off his penis. Reporting from the Washington Free Beacon concluded that Biden’s story is almost certainly fiction.

Thursday’s speech comes just a day after Biden claimed outside of a Scranton, Pennsylvania, war memorial that his uncle died and was eaten by cannibals in World War II. Records show that Biden’s uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, likely died after his plane suffered catastrophic engine failure off the coast of New Guinea during a routine trip.

There is no evidence his body was eaten.