At last, America has a gaffe-prone president again

‘Folks, I can tell you, I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.’ So said then vice-president Joe Biden in 2012. A month earlier, he had assured a crowd in New York that President Barack Obama could, in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous words, ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’ when it came to international relations. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘The president has a big stick.’ The crowd started laughing at the double-entendre. Joe wasn’t joking. ‘I promise you,’ he repeated, gravely.

That is just Joe being Joe. The 46th president is someone who quite often has no idea what he is saying. Curiously, everybody seems relieved about that. We’re told Biden’s presidency will mark a ‘return to normalcy’. Really it will mark the triumphant return of the gaffe-prone president.

For decades, Biden’s verbal blundering has been the stuff of legend. His presidential campaign of 1988 died because he plagiarised a Neil Kinnock speech. As a senator, he was called ‘the gaffe machine from Delaware’. Or as the Washington Post once put it: ‘Joe Biden isn’t a gaffe machine. He’s the Lamborghini of gaffes.’

Biden’s boobs come in different forms. He can be unnecessarily revealing: ‘I’d rather be at home making love to my wife while my children sleep.’ Or stunningly thoughtless: ‘Stand up Chuck! Let ’em see ya!’ he once called out to Senator Chuck Graham, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic. Or accidentally racist, which is hilarious because the party he now leads is so very PC. In 2008, in another muddled attempt at praising Obama, Biden added: ‘I mean, you’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’ Later that year, Biden introduced him as ‘the next president of the United States, Barack America’.