History lesson

OK, the history buff in me couldn’t resist posting briefly on this.  From Ben Smith at Politico (emphasis mine):

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?'”

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Franklin Roosevelt had just barely taken office as governor of New York.  He didn’t become president until 1933, and didn’t appear on television for the first time until 1939.  (Moreover, who had TVs then?  A call for calm in a television address following the market crash in 1929 would have reached roughly as many people as, oh…say, a streaming podcast following the Kuwait invasion in 1991.)

File this under the existing meme:  Joe Biden, the gaffe that keeps on gaffe-ing.