Joe Biden's Best Political Gaffes Of 2008 & 2009
The 47th Vice President And His Many Bidenisms
Joe Biden, the 47th Vice President of the USA, has been a national political figure for nearly 37 years. The first 36 (1972-2008) were spent in the Senate. Since November 2008, he has served as President Barack Obama’s vice president.
Anyone who has been in public life for 37 years is bound to misspeak once in a while. But in recent years, Joe Biden has racked up a stack of verbal slip-ups that Internet mediums like Slate have termed Bidenisms - as it similarly named President Bush's Bushisms - while CNN and other media have called him “the gaffe-prone VP”. The following is a Top 10 of Biden’s most notable gaffes of the last two years, through the summer of 2009.
Political Gaffes of 2008
At his first campaign event as Obama’s VP nominee in Springfield, Illinois on August 23, 2008, Joe Biden referred to his running mate and future president as “Barack America.”
During a Sept. 12, 2008 campaign stop in Columbia, Missouri, Mr. Biden called for wheelchair-bound State Senator Chuck Graham to "stand up." To his credit, the veteran politician was quick to realize his error afterwards, saying to Graham, "Oh, God love ya. What am I talking about?"
On the September 16, 2008 edition of NBC’s TODAY show, then vice president candidate Joe Biden told interviewer Meredith Vieira that he supported the Bush administration’s AIG bailout. One problem: Obama and the rest of the Obama-Biden campaign had yet to express support or opposition to the bailout.
On September 22, 2008, Biden said: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk … he said, 'Look, here's what happened.’” Herbert Hoover, not FDR was president in 1929, and television did not exist back then.
On October 15, 2008 in Ohio, when criticizing GOP presidential nominee John McCain, Biden made this gaffe: “John'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.”
Political Gaffes of 2009
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, senator-turned Vice President Biden referred to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who swore him as VP, as “Justice Stewart.” He confused Stevens with Justice Potter Stewart, who retired from the Supreme Court in late 1981.
On January 30, 2009, Biden was asked to swear in senior White House staffers by President Obama. Before doing so, he made the political gaffe of mocking Chief Justice John Roberts, who flubbed the historic oath to President Obama on Inauguration Day. The two would re-do it later in private. With this in mind, Biden quipped the following before swearing in the staffers: “Am I doing this again? My memory is not as good as Justice Roberts.”
On the February 25, 2009 edition of CBS’s Early Show, the vice president said this to the audience and an aide out of view when asked the location where viewers can track the federal government’s stimulus spending: “You know, I'm embarrassed. Do you know the Web site number?” He was trying to refer to Recovery.gov.
Joe Biden was greeted by an unidentified former Senate colleague at a March 13, 2009 event at Union Station in D.C. promoting Amtrak funding, but wasn’t happy with the ex-senator’s arrival time. The VP was then caught on a live microphone swearing at him: “An hour late. Oh, gimme a f****** break.”
About three weeks after President Obama hit the “reset” button on U.S.-Russia relations and sought a “strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia,” Biden veered off the White House script and had this to say about Russia in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on July 25, 2009: “They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy… they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”
Bonus Bidenism
On July 16, 2009 at a stop in Virginia, the VP explained the Obama administration’s approach to stimulus spending to help the ailing economy with this statement: “People, when I say that, look at me and say, 'What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes.”
References
"Biden's 'Withering Economy' Comment Roils Relations With Moscow," Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2009. Last Accessed: October 29, 2009.
For more Biden gaffes, this Slate article is recommended.
47th Vice President Joe Biden, August 2009
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