Joe Biden: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Before Barack Obama announced his selection of Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate, Rush Limbaugh would plead with Illinois Senator to choose Biden. Please, please, please, let it be Biden, Limbaugh would say. This guy would do more to help McCain than anyone could ever hope for, the logic went.

I used to find it amusing to listen to Limbaugh's begging Obama to pick Biden for the VP slot. But since the Democratic convention, I've come to understand why Limbaugh was saying what he was saying. Biden is a gaffe machine. His propensity for being verbose is, as Limbaugh describes it, the gift that keeps on giving.

What follows is a quick review of some of Biden's most notable gaffes. We'll start with the most recent. On October 20, Biden warned Americans that the world would test Barack Obama in his first six months as president. "Mark my words," Biden said. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

So what's Biden telling us? Is the world not waiting to generate a crisis to test McCain if he becomes president? Does the world view Obama as so inexperienced that they foresee an opportunity to "test" the new America? In just a few sentences Biden managed to put on glaring display one of the key differences between Obama and McCain: experience. Thank you Senator Biden! McCain nailed it when he said, "We don't want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars."

Here's another great Biden gaffe: saying Hillary Clinton could have been a better choice for vice president. Biden said, "She's easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me."

And then, of course, there's the time Biden put FDR on television when the stock market crashed. The only problems with his statement were that Hoover was president, not FDR, and television would not be around for another decade. Oops.

How about the time Biden told the guy in the wheelchair to stand up? "Stand up, Chuck," will forever be burned in my memory as one of Joe Biden's not-so-great moments. Or how about when Biden was against clean coal technology while Obama was for it? Or when Biden criticized an Obama ad about McCain's computer skills?

There seems to be no end to the string of Biden gaffes. And while it's fun to pick at Senator Biden, his comments October 20 reaffirm the fact that this country doesn't just need to select a new president. It needs to select a commander-in-chief who is ready to lead.