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.”