Picking on poor Ol’ Uncle Joe
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Everybody’s piling on Joe Biden, and it’s not quite
fair. Of course, a presidential campaign, like life,
is unfair. We have John F. Kennedy’s word on that.
Maybe we should give ol’ Joe a break. He’s our only
source of campaign humor, if not exactly the
sharpest wit.
Even
The Washington Post, now in full-battle dress to
protect Democratic interests, thinks it’s OK to pick
on ol’ Joe. Writes Post blogger Alexandra Petri: “He
inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon
introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had
a Scotch too many.”
One’s
fiancé should just grin and bear it. But one never
knows, as Fats Waller famously asked, do one? A lot
of Joe’s malapropisms, blurts and boners – the
remarks the press, eager to display a foreign
language skill, inevitably calls “gaffes” – are just
the sort of thing that endears Joe to a lot of other
grandpas. The vice president, after all, is
constitutionally harmless, like a wart in an
embarrassing place on the body politic.
It’s
certainly true, though, that Joe has overdrawn the
unlimited checking account Barack Obama gave him on
inauguration day. The president’s dilemma, and it is
a true dilemma, is what to do about the second
banana. He knows he couldn’t trust Joe at the
funeral of the president of Volta, upper or lower,
and foreign funerals are the default preserve of
veeps. But he can’t indulge himself by bouncing Joe
off the ticket, either.
The
suggestion from some Republican worthies that the
Democratic ticket could be cured of foot-in-mouth
disease by recruiting Hillary Clinton is an
indulgence of mischief, meant to needle the
president. (As if on cue, the White House rose to
the bait, firing back at Sarah Palin.) The last
presidential candidate who blinked was George
McGovern, who relieved Tom Eagleton in 1972 in the
wake of revelations that Mr. Eagleton had once
submitted to electric shock treatments to clear the
fog between his ears.
President Obama’s defense of Joe this week, that
he’s only guilty of something called “phrasing
distractions,” was no doubt meant to be mild
scolding, and Joe should button his lip when he
feels the urge to spill and splurge. Joe has been
around long enough to know that a politician,
Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative,
never gets a pass to mention race without
genuflecting first toward Al and Jesse, and maybe
Maxine Waters, too. “Slavery is nothing to joke
about,” says Doug Wilder, the former Democratic
governor of Virginia.
Joe
just can’t quit talking about slavery, perhaps a
reflection of Delaware’s curious Civil War history.
Delaware flirted mildly with secession before its
legislature voted unanimously to stay in the union,
and it contributed troops to both union and
Confederate regiments. Delaware’s congressmen
needled Abraham Lincoln mercilessly throughout the
war. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to
Delaware and the four northern slave states and the
legislature didn’t get around to freeing its slaves
until it adopted the 13th Amendment eight months
after Appomattox. Joe, a native Pennsylvanian, has
continued the Delaware tradition of ambivalence (or
at least inadvertence).
He
once told Fox News Sunday that “my state was a slave
state, my state is a border state." And he curried
South Carolina favor reminding an audience in
Charleston that Delaware was "a slave state that
fought beside the north. That’s only because we
couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There
were a couple of states in the way.” Well, only
Maryland, actually, but Joe’s point is clear enough.
Joe
has been mostly harmless and nearly always
entertaining, like Yogi Berra but without Yogi’s
shrewd philosophical insights. He once told a
Democratic caucus 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.”
Borrowing the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s most
famous remark, he assured skeptics of Barack Obama
that “I promise you, this president has a big
stick.” He described Barack Obama as “the first
mainstream African-American who is articulate and
bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Joe
usually means well, even if he doesn’t show it. He’s
not as smart as Paul Ryan, but he’ll help the
Republican ticket, too. So a little compassion is in
order. Rudy Giuliani says Joe may not have the
“mental capacity” to be president, but even if true
he wouldn’t be the first prospective bumbler in
chief in the office that John Nance Garner called
“not worth a warm pitcher of spit.”
Former Via. Gov. Douglas Wilder
It’s
important to keep first things in mind. “To err is
human, to forgive divine,” as the 17th-century poet
Alexander Pope reminds us. Or maybe the 20th-century
philosopher Mae West said it better for our times:
“To err is human, but it feels divine.”
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.