Joe Biden knows all about “locker room talk.”
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” the former vice president told students at an anti-sexual assault rally on Tuesday. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” said Biden. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
Bear in mind that Biden is seriously mulling a presidential bid.
Engaging in hypothetical scenarios that end with him “beating the hell out of” the president (which he’s done before), implying that Donald Trump is “the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room,” this is not normal political rhetoric.
And that’s probably the point.
Juxtaposed with a cast of stick-to-the-script primary opponents, and then Hillary Clinton, Trump’s loose-lipped communications style endeared him to voters exhausted with the political establishment. It’s possible by 2020 enough voters will have tired of Trump going off script that a lane will open up for someone a little more boring. But Biden seems to be betting on another possibility.
If he can affect a similar style– talking tough, speaking less like a politician and more like a guy at a bar — it helps him package his progressive politics more palatably, and defangs one of Trump’s biggest assets.
