Reality begs to differ.

DETROIT – Revving up a crowd at a Detroit high school, Vice President Joe Biden offered up one of his father’s old adages to illustrate the tenacity the people of Detroit possess as their city works to recover from the crisis in the auto industry.

“My dad used to say you measure a man or woman – it wasn’t whether they got knocked down, but how quickly they got up. And guess what? Detroit’s getting back up,” Biden told an estimated crowd of 1,100 packed into a narrow hallway at Renaissance High School Wednesday.

Detroit’s unemployment rate remains more than a point above the national average, sitting at 9.7 percent in June, but over the past three years, the unemployment rate in the city has decreased dramatically from its 27.8 percent rate in July 2009. Michigan’s unemployment rate rose last month, jumping from 8.6 percent in June to 9 percent in July.

Biden, who called Mitt Romney a “decent” man despite boos emanating from the crowd, knocked the presumptive GOP nominee for the 2008 New York Times op-ed he penned with the headline “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” saying that the president’s approach to dealing with the auto industry proved successful.