Here’s a sampling of the vice president’s verbal miscues during his career:
» President Barack Obama put Biden in charge of overseeing his $787 billion economic stimulus bill to prevent waste, fraud and abuse. Biden then confided to the rest of America that “if we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”
» As a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: “I’ve had a great relationship” with Indian Americans. “In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
» On the day he announced his candidacy, Biden said this of Obama: “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.” Biden later issued an apology to Obama.
» During the 2008 presidential campaign, Biden told a supporter in Ohio: “We’re not supporting clean coal,” and added that under Obama there would be “no coal plants here in America.” But Obama had already endorsed the use of coal plants as part of the nation’s energy mix and advertised that fact in coal states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky — and Ohio.
» When the Obama campaign aired a television attack ad that criticized Republican nominee John McCain’s lackluster interest in computers and other new technologies, Biden denounced it as “terrible” on national television. “I didn’t know we did it, and if I’d had anything to do with it, we would have never done it,” he said. The Obama campaign put out a statement noting that Biden had never actually seen the ad.
» Biden tried to reassure gun owners that Obama had no plans to institute new laws that would restrict their access to firearms by telling them, “I guarantee you Barack Obama ain’t taking my shotguns, so don’t buy that malarkey.” He added, “If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”
» Biden told the National Guard Association about a trip to Afghanistan in which his helicopter “was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators [aboard] at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains” where Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding. But Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was on the trip, told a reporter at the time that bad weather, not enemy fire, forced the pilot to take evasive maneuvers. Kerry joked to the Associated Press, “We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs.”
» When he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Biden gave a speech in which he questioned why his generation, and not his parents’, was the first to consider going to college a possibility. His words were almost identical to those spoken earlier by Neil Kinnock, a leader in Britain’s Labor Party.
» During the 1988 campaign, Biden got angry during an appearance in a private home when a guest questioned his academic record. “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do,” Biden said. He then blurted out that he was “the only one in my class” to attend Syracuse University’s law school on a full academic scholarship (he had a partial scholarship based on financial need); that he’d graduated Syracuse in the top half of his class (he was ranked 76th out of 85 graduates); that he’d been named “outstanding student” by the University of Delaware’s political science department (he’d been nominated by a professor, but didn’t win); and that he received three degrees from the University of Delaware (he received a single bachelor’s degree but had a dual major in history and political science). Reporters would later uncover that Biden had been accused of plagiarizing part of a paper at Syracuse, though he said it was only a faulty citation.
“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden explained at the time, “but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
