While it is cliche for political figures to portray themselves as being “as American as apple pie,” President Joe Biden has long advertised another selling point: He’s also as Irish as a pint of Guinness (despite being, like his predecessor, a teetotaler).
More so than any president since John F. Kennedy — the only other Catholic to hold the office — Biden’s Irish heritage is central to his public persona. He is so strongly identified with it that Sarah Palin, famously, could not get his name right. During prep sessions for their 2008 vice presidential debate, she kept referring to him as Senator O’Biden, according to an account given by a campaign aide. His Secret Service codename, meanwhile, is Celtic.
Biden comes by his Irish Catholic identity honestly. He spent his earliest years surrounded by his mother’s Irish American family, the Finnegans, in the Irish American stronghold of Scranton, Pennsylvania. After moving to Delaware during elementary school, he was schooled by nuns at Parochial schools.
He also makes sure to emphasize it. Like many Irish-American politicians, he is a regular at St. Patrick’s Day feasts and makes frequent allusions to his Irish Catholic upbringing in public remarks. Biden, though, has gone further than most. He commissioned a genealogy of his Irish ancestors, rolling it out for public consumption at the tail end of his vice presidency, when he and his family toured the Emerald Isle to great fanfare, visiting ancestral sites.
“His background led to this,” said Timothy Meagher, a professor emeritus at Catholic University and scholar of Irish American history. At the same time, “He plays on it, some of it consciously.”
Biden has had plenty of reasons to lean into his Irish heritage over the years. 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. 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. Throughout, it has helped him bolster a personal brand built on Average Joe relatability.
“He kind of embodies the American common man,” Meagher said. “And Irish Americans have been an important manifestation of that image from the beginning of the republic.”
But that’s only half the story of Biden’s heritage — or, more precisely, five-eighths of it. While Biden embraces his Irish roots, the rest of his family tree rarely comes up. And that side of the family has a more complicated legacy.