Time's Carney Joining Team Obama As Biden Gaffe Goalie?

Was Time magazine's Jay Carney hired by the Obama transition as Joe Biden's director of communications in order to keep a tight lid on the Beltway's greatest gaffe machine?

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reports, you decide:

Time magazine's Jay Carney, who said over the summer that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is "incredibly prone to say the wrong thing," will soon be in charge of ensuring that doesn't happen again.

[...]

In July, before Barack Obama picked the senator from Delaware as his running mate, Carney said on MSNBC that "Biden may be the answer" because of his foreign policy credentials. The "downside," Carney said, is that Biden has said the wrong thing "throughout his career. . . . He's smart, but he speaks -- shoots from the hip and sometimes says just wrong thing at the wrong time."

[...]

Early last year, when Biden was a presidential candidate, Carney defended him during a flap over his remark that Obama was "the first mainstream African American" candidate who was "clean" and "articulate." Carney said on "Hardball" that "what Biden was saying, and this is Biden's fault for not being clear in what he was saying in this interview, is that there hasn't been a candidate, a viable African American candidate with all those qualities in one . . . who is mainstream."

Jay Carney profile photo from Time.com.