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Joe Biden: Could We Get a President Gaffe?

Written by

Mike Tuttle

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“An hour late? Oh, give me a f**king break!” –Joe Biden

Anytime you bring up Joe Biden’s name, the first word out of the mouth of someone standing nearby is “gaffe”. In fact, before Biden got onto the Dem ticket in 2008, you could count on one hand the number of times you heard the word “gaffe” in a year. Now some people seem to think it is the Vice-President’s middle name.

It’s kind of like how the term “white Ford Bronco” used to be innocuous back before O.J. Simpson. Now, if you say that phrase, everyone knows what you mean. Say the word “gaffe”, and people chuckle about Joe Biden.

And Joe has it coming, to be honest, even he would probably admit that. This is the guy who once said to a man in a wheelchair, “Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya.”

Then came his remark to an Indian-American man, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent…. I’m not joking.”

The fact is, we live in an era when every sentence a politician says is recorded, scrutinized, and comes back to haunt him. This has even derailed otherwise promising political campaigns and whole careers. Remember “macaca?”

George Allen was the U.S. Senator from Virginia, and was favored to win reelection in 2012 until this video hit the news and YouTube. His campaign suffered a blow that it never recovered from when the video of him referring to the man behind the camera, an Indian-America fellow, as “macaca”.

Many speculated that Allen knew the pejorative use for the term — monkey, an insult to dark skinned-people — due to his mother’s heritage. In any case, it cost him a lot of time handling this embarrassment, and he lost his reelection bid in what was considered an easy battle. Such is the scrutiny of elected officials.

Before Joe Biden was the ineffable Dan Quayle, VP to George H.W. Bush. Quayle’s greatest hits include:

“Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.”

“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history… No, not our nation’s, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century, but in this century’s history.”

and, finally …

“I made a misstatement and I stand by all my misstatements.”

Some say that Joe Biden’s relaxed attitude toward precision and tendency to flub it up a bit every now and then would prevent folks from taking him seriously as a Presidential candidate in 2016.

And others think that Biden does not stand a chance with a presumptive Hillary Clinton run.

Americans have a sense of humor. We’ll see where they end up landing on Biden’s loose tongue issues.

Image via YouTube

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