Media Continues Attacks On Palin, While Gaffemaster Biden is Toasted

But not in the UK-mailonline

Is Joe Biden a Liability for new US President?

"...Thanks to his penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, the six-term Senator was permanently perched on the edge of a serious outbreak of foot-in-mouth that could have turned the slick campaign into a laughing stock at any moment.

But brace yourselves. For the man with a peculiar talent for conflict and a remarkable gift of the gaffe will shortly be just a heartbeat away from the presidency when he takes his seat as Obama's 'Vee-Pee'.

So just what was it about the silver-haired Vice-President elect which was deemed to make him such a liability?

Perhaps his most celebrated blunder came in September at a rally in Missouri, when he called out to State Senator Chuck Graham: 'Stand up Chuck! Let 'em see ya!'

Senator Graham, as most of the audience either knew or quickly realised, is a wheelchair-bound paraplegic. Spotting his own mistake, Biden rapidly backtracked by declaring: 'Oh God love you. What am I talking about?' Then he urged everyone in the crowd to stand up for Chuck. Who says he's not a political genius?

Joe Biden with granddaughter Naomi. The new US vice president's biological claims have been doubted

When he and Obama were competing for the Democratic nomination in January 2007, he told the New York Observer: 'I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.'

Clean? Ah yes. He deeply regretted that some people had taken his use of the word 'totally out of context'.

Earlier this year, still in the nomination race, he said his Illinois Senator rival - now his boss - was not yet ready to be president, adding: 'The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.'

Joe was born to a working class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania in November 1942 and is reckoned to be one of the poorest US Senators. He is of Irish Roman Catholic heritage, a background which, coupled with his blustering style, has earned him the secondary nickname of Joe Blarney. Some of his comments certainly capture the legendary stone's flavour. 'This malarkey about this being socialised medicine is pure malarkey,' he said of criticism about Obama's health plan.

Some claim there is also a touch of Blarney about his biographical claims.

Biden spoke movingly in a keynote speech during his 1988 presidential campaign about being the first member of his family to go to college. (He wasn't). He told his audience: 'Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?...No... It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand.'

If this oration sounded faintly familiar, it's because it was. He had shamelessly plagiarised a speech given by Neil Kinnock, in which the Labour leader had asked: 'Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.'

It later emerged that Biden had used an unattributed quote from Robert Kennedy, and that he had faced another accusation of plagiarism while in law school.

Other Joe Blow gaffes include his lauding of Franklin D Roosevelt for his leadership during the 1929 stock market crash, saying FDR 'got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed'.

NB: Herbert Hoover was president during the 1929 crash. FDR was not elected until 1932. TV didn't come into US homes until 1939.

Elsewhere, Biden branded as 'terrible' a campaign advert that made fun of John McCain's inability to use a computer. Alas, it was an Obama campaign ad. 'I didn't know we did it,' said Biden.

And he famously said Obama might have been wiser to have chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate. 'Quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me.'

In an effort to redress the balance, perhaps, he quoted Obama (almost) directly. He declared that the most important issue facing the American middle classes was, 'as Barack says, a three-letter word: Jobs. J-o-b-s, Jobs.'