Joe Biden: The Mouth That Roars

(GETTY IMAGES)

For Joe Biden, gab is no gift. America’s garrulous vice president has a long record of verbal gaffes and a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Indeed, his flapping tongue has cost him dearly.

Biden sank his own bid for the presidency in 1988 with a series of inflated claims about his academic credentials and a partially plagiarized speech. Twenty years later, on the day he joined the 2008 presidential race, he eclipsed the news of his own candidacy and reinforced the notion that he represented the political past by describing a black challenger named Barack Obama as “clean.”

In his four months as vice president, Biden sparked an international incident with a warning that airplanes and subways should be avoided during an outbreak of swine flu; revealed the location of the secret bunker vice presidents use in times of national emergency; and claimed President Franklin D. Roosevelt went on television when the stock market crashed in 1929 even though FDR wasn’t president at the time and television wasn’t yet widely available.

Obama has been caught on camera cringing at what he once called his vice president’s “rhetorical flourishes.” When Biden needled Chief Justice John G. Roberts about flubbing the swearing-in of Obama, the president gave him a look that could kill. Biden subsequently called Roberts to apologize.

Biden acknowledges his problems with logorrhea. “Much of the ridicule of me is well-deserved,” he said recently on CBS’s “60 Minutes” — a statement that could be construed as refreshingly honest or yet another gaffe.

To get Biden away from network microphones, Obama has given him an on-the-road, ceremonial role common to modern vice presidents before Dick Cheney. First Biden traveled to Europe in February to visit NATO allies in Brussels, Belgium. Then he hopscotched around the country, alighting in places like St. Cloud, Minn., to plump for Obama’s stimulus plan. When second-tier foreign dignitaries like former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visit Washington, Biden often acts as official greeter.

Just last week, Biden was dispatched to the Balkans, making mercifully little news even when the White House extended his trip by two days for a visit to Lebanon.

Biden is more important to Obama as a private adviser. His long stint on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave him a sure grip of international affairs, and his service on the Judiciary Committee makes him a savvy judge of prospective Supreme Court nominees.

“Biden is not a lightweight,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who has studied vice presidents since his own days in the Eisenhower White House. “He may have a problem with a mouth that runneth over, but he’s worth listening to.”

Biden’s blunders are the new “Bushisms,” President George W. Bush’s vast anthology of malapropisms and non sequiturs that drew sniggers from Bush’s critics but appeared only to endear him to supporters as a straight talker. Slate magazine, noting how little lasting damage Biden’s abundant misstatements have inflicted on his credibility, offered this analysis: “ ‘Joe Biden Makes Gaffe’ is the new ‘Dog Bites Man.’ ”

During the campaign, when much attention focused on the factual blunders of Biden’s GOP counterpart, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republicans complained that Biden was getting a free ride from the media. Biden’s supporters argued that despite occasional lapses while speaking, he had a solid understanding of Washington and the world and would be far more qualified than Palin to take over as president.

Political analysts and people who know Biden said his biography has bestowed on him an authenticity that helps him weather storms of his own making. At a time when many well-to-do politicians create log cabin stories about their humble beginnings, Joe Biden comes across as a real Joe Sixpack.

An Irish Catholic born in the hardscrabble coal region of Scranton, Pa., and raised in a modest home in Wilmington, Del., Biden, his supporters said, has never lost his common touch despite spending almost all of his adult life working in Washington.

His first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash just weeks after he defeated a deeply entrenched Republican incumbent for a seat in the Senate in 1972. Biden then took to traveling home to Delaware by train every night that Congress was in session — a 90-minute trip — to be with his two boys, Beau and Hunter. In the morning, he made the same trip back to Washington. Train conductors sometimes held the last train of the evening a few minutes to make sure Biden got aboard, and every Christmas Biden threw a celebratory barbecue for Amtrak employees.

Biden was among the longest-serving members of what has been described as the world’s most exclusive millionaires club, but with a net worth somewhere between $59,000 and $366,000, he was consistently ranked among the Senate’s poorest members.

“He’s been very popular with voters in Delaware regardless of some of his verbal gaffes,” said William Boyer, a retired University of Delaware political science professor who has co-authored a book on the First State’s politics.

“He’s been successful, a careerist and a leader, and the chairman of big committees,” Boyer said. “Now that he’s vice president, we’ve lost a lot of the seniority he accrued in all those years.”

If Obama’s campaign had second thoughts about whether to put Biden on the ticket, Biden had his own doubts about whether he was suited to be anyone’s No. 2 man. “I made it clear to [Obama] and everybody else, I never worked for anybody in my life. ... I never had a boss. I don’t know how I’d handle it,” Biden said before Obama formally asked him to join the ticket.

Obama took advantage of Biden’s Everyman persona during the campaign by sending him to economically distressed sections of swing states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Biden’s small-town upbringing resonated, particularly among union members who held him in much higher regard than they did Obama. By limiting Biden’s exposure, Obama’s campaign also hoped to minimize any fallout from Biden’s loose lips. But in that regard, they were less successful.

In Seattle, Biden warned that foreign leaders were eagerly awaiting a chance to test Obama’s mettle as soon as he took office. He told a supporter in Ohio that there’d be no more coal plants under an Obama administration even though Obama promised there would be. And when the Obama campaign ran a television advertisement attacking Republican nominee John McCain, Biden denounced it as “terrible.”

Even when he wasn’t contradicting Obama, Biden was causing the campaign heartburn. During a stop in Missouri, Biden singled out state Sen. Chuck Graham in the crowd and shouted, “Chuck, stand up, let the people see you.” But Graham couldn’t. He’s confined to a wheelchair.

Biden, no stranger to foot-in-mouth disease, didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, God love ya,” Biden said. “What am I talking about?”

Heaven knows, but count on Joe Biden to keep gabbing until he finds out.