‘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.
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