The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday spun Joe Biden's seemingly unending series of gaffes as proof that the Vice President is a combination of "affable everyman and the Dos Equis 'Most Interesting Man in the World.'" Although staff writer Michael Memoli admitted that Biden's blunders can "keep Obama strategists awake at night," he studiously avoided actually describing any examples.
Instead, in a page one story, Memoli hyped, "For a White House led by a famously cool — at times robotic — commander in chief, the vice president's loose, less-programmed, often self-deprecating style provides a humanizing touch." The print edition featured a smiling Biden with the headline, "Just an average Joe?"
Campaign strategists see him as a perfect weapon to use against Romney — "Scranton Joe" vs. "Swiss Mitt." After Romney had called Obama "out of touch" in a recent address, Biden asked soon after: "Hey, how many of you all have a Swiss bank account?"
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At a steel manufacturing plant, Biden's voice crackled with emotion as he raged against Republican criticism of those attacks as "class warfare."
Yet, the closest Memoli came to actually explaining any of Biden's gaffes was in relating that Obama's campaign website is selling "'BFD' T-shirts (memorializing one of the vice president's more famous off-color lines)."
It's not as though there aren't numerous examples, in addition to the "BFD" incident:
"This is a big f****** deal!" --Joe Biden, caught on an open mic congratulating President Barack Obama during the health care signing ceremony, Washington, D.C., March 23, 2010.
"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." –Joe Biden, apparently unaware that FDR wasn't president when the stock market crashed in 1929 and that only experimental TV sets were in use at that time, interview with Katie Couric, Sept. 22, 2008.
"Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya." –-Joe Biden, to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair, Columbia, Missouri, Sept. 12, 2008.
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." –Joe Biden, referring to Barack Obama at the beginning of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Jan. 31, 2007.
Instead, Memoli only generally referred to Biden's verbal miscues: "On Biden's recent swing through eastern Ohio, Romney spokesman Ryan Williams trailed him, iPhone camera in hand, trying to catalog gaffes and perhaps to provoke one."
Dan Quayle, readers will remember, never had it so easy.
[H/T NewBusters reader Gary Hall.]
