Biden Gaffe Machine
by Jordan McClintock
Issue 132 - May 20, 2009

That Thursday was a typical day in the life of Joe Biden. The Vice President got out of bed, dressed, ate breakfast, went down to the NBC studio, and stuck his foot in his mouth.

Asked on the Today Show what he would tell his family about traveling to Mexico, Biden replied:

I would tell members of my family - and I have - I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now.It's not just going to Mexico, if you're in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That's me. I would not be at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway.

The airline industry – hard-hit by inflated gasoline prices and the recession – took the remarks badly. American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith told the AP, "To suggest that people not fly at this stage of things is a broad brush stroke bordering on fear mongering. The facts of the situation at this stage anyway certainly don't support that."

Roger Dow, head of the U.S. Travel Association, was even more pointed: “Elected officials must strike a delicate balance of accurately and adequately informing citizens of health concerns without unduly discouraging travel and other important economic activity."

No reply from the subway folks, who perhaps had a hard time untangling Biden’s syntax.

His office, accustomed to foot-in-mouth crises, immediately responded. Spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander -- head of the Uh-Oh-He’s-Done-It-Again Squad – said with a perfectly straight face: "On the Today Show this morning, the vice president was asked what he would tell a family member who was considering air travel to Mexico this week. The advice he is giving family members is the same advice the administration is giving to all Americans: that they should avoid unnecessary air travel to and from Mexico. If they are sick, they should avoid airplanes and other confined public spaces, such as subways."

The Uh-Oh-Squad’s Plan A is always to allow a merely stupid statement to lie on the ground, trusting the Democratic media to ignore it. Plan B -- used only in cases where the remark cannot be ignored -- sometimes involves looking the press straight in the eye and lying. That Thursday, Ms. Alexander opted for Plan B, as anyone could tell after comparing what Biden said with what his office said he said.

Biden specifically said he wasn’t merely talking about Mexico (“It's not just going to Mexico….”) but presumably everywhere his family might travel on plane, train, or subway: to London, to Las Vegas, to L’Enfant Plaza on the DC Metro. He did not qualify his reply by saying “if they are sick.” The meaning of his statement is all too clear: “I would tell my family, have told my family, ‘Don’t use public transportation if you can avoid it.’”

Americans have come to understand that the vice president’s tongue is not wired to his brain. It’s like a toy monkey. You wind it up, and it dances around uncontrollably. You laugh, but you don’t take it seriously. After all, this is the same Joe Biden who said: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" (When the stock market crashed, Hoover was president, and nobody had a television set in the den.)

And this: "A man I'm proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next President of the United States — Barack America!"

And this to former state senator Chuck Graham, who is confined to a wheel chair: "Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya."

And this: “Look, John (McCain)’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs."

And this slightly more impolitic remark: “[Y]ou cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

And who can forget that he called Obama: "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"?

These are just a few examples of why Vice President Biden is called “the gaffe machine.” And there’s nothing Obama can do about him. He can’t restrict his movements to the Old Executive Office Building. He can’t sew his mouth shut. He can’t put him in St. Elizabeth’s with John Hinckley. Every day the President wakes up with the troubling knowledge that Joe Biden will be out and about, talking to people.

Hey, it could be worse. Biden might be president. Here’s a guy who could start World War III and never know he’d done it. You can imagine Kim Jong-Il taking offense at one of his gaffes and – poof! – there goes Los Angeles. No one in this country takes him seriously, except maybe the travel industry. Indeed, Americans weren’t surprised to learn that the following Saturday he took an Amtrak train from Washington to Delaware.