During a New Hampshire campaign stop on Sunday, Madison Moore, a student at Mercer University, asked the former vice president a question about his underwhelming finish in the Iowa caucuses and got an unusual response.
"How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?" she asked.
Biden, 77, responded by asking her if she had ever been to a caucus, and, after Moore nodded, he quipped, "No, you haven't. You're a lying, dog-faced pony soldier."
Although the Biden campaign has said that the strange remark was intended in jest, Moore told the Macon Telegraph on Monday that to wave it off as a joke was "kind of insulting."
"It was kind of humiliating to be called a liar on national TV by the former vice president," Moore said. "Instead of answering that question straightforward, his immediate response was to attempt to invalidate me by exposing my inexperience."
Moore explained that she was nervous when Biden asked her about attending a caucus. She also said that it was a perfectly valid question to ask the former front-runner, who finished in fourth during the nation's first 2020 litmus test, adding that whether she has attended a caucus is irrelevant.
"He has been performing extremely poorly in this race, and the fact that he couldn't just straight answer my question without bullying or intimidating just exacerbates that fact," Moore said. "I am a 21-year-old college student, like, what the hell do I know? Who cares who I am or my experience? Just answer the damn question."
Symone Sanders, a senior campaign adviser, said the comment was a joke and downplayed the national attention the remark has received. The campaign has claimed the line, which Biden has used before, is from a John Wayne movie.
Comment: Or not. Apparently no one has been able to find that exact phrase. Fox News reports:
At a 2018 campaign event, Biden offered some hints as to the origin of the phrase, remarking, "As my brother who loves to use lines from movies, from John Wayne movies, there's a line in a movie, a John Wayne movie where an Indian chief turns to John Wayne and says, 'This is a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.'"
But, TMZ first reported that the phrase may in fact have come from the 1952 Tyrone Power film called "Pony Soldier." Still, no line in the movie includes the full phrase, "lying, dog-faced pony soldier." ("The pony soldier speaks with the tongue of the snake that rattles," a character says at one point.)
However, in the 1949 John Wayne film "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," a narrator at the end of the film does say part of the phrase Biden uttered: "dog-faced soldiers." It is not directed explicitly at a character played by Wayne, and it is intended as a compliment.
"So here they are: the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the 50-cents-a-day professionals, riding the outposts of the nation," the narrator says. "From Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark, they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue, and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode, and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States."
"Many people in the room laughed. Many people in the room laughed, and it was a line he has actually used frequently," Sanders said.
Moore said that when she asked the question, she had no idea the exchange would go viral and become national news.
"If I had expected that, I would've worn makeup," she said. "I would've looked a lot cuter."
I am not denigrating the student, but calling out the institutions that have CLAIMED to have taught her anything.
R.C.