Joe Biden's Top 7 Gaffe-iest Gaffes

Vice President Joe Biden is famous for many things: his encyclopedic knowledge of history and foreign policy, his general good nature, his insistence to remain as grounded and normal as possible in spite of his rising rank in Washington. However, nothing has made him quite as famous over the years as his near-constant stream of gaffes. Even though they are usually dismissed as good-natured attempts to communicate his point, the initial firestorm can be enormous. Since he has made it into the news once again by gaffe-ing his way into the bad graces of an enormous industry in the United States, this seems as good a time as any to put this gaffe into perspective with a chronicling of Joe Biden's Top 7Gaffe-iest Gaffes:

7. While stumping in Missouri for his running mate, Joe Biden pointed out state Senator Chuck Graham. Attempting to honor him, he said, "Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya." Chuck Graham is in a wheelchair.

6. In 2006, while talking to an Indian-American gentleman on CSPAN, Joe Biden was caught saying, "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.... I'm not joking." Needless to say, the man wasn't as flattered as Biden thought he might be.

5. While giving a stump speech during the presidential campaign, Biden suddenly turned around to the people behind him and said, "Pardon my back!"

4. Of course, there was also what was seen by many to be the death knell in his 2008 presidential campaign. As the primary campaign was just starting, Joe Biden referred to Barack Obama by saying, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." The "clean" part of that wound up haunting Biden especially in the following months.

3. Right before the election, Joe Biden said in an interview with Katie Couric, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened." While FDR's powers of calming the nation are famous, the problems here are two-fold: (a) The stock market crashed under Hoover, in 1929; and (b) TV wasn't yet a mainstay in American homes at the time.

2. Referring to Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden said, "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me."

1. And, of course, he's recently made news by angering the public transportation industry (one he used to count among his biggest supporters, given his constant championing of Amtrak) by saying, "I would tell members of my family -- and I have -- I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now. It's not that it's going to Mexico. It's you're in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft." Not only did this not help calm the public in the wake of the announcement of Swine Flu reaching pandemic proportions, but it also did nothing to help a flailing industry in a flailing economy.

Seen stacked up against just a few notable gaffes from the last couple years, Joe Biden's most recent and notable gaffe seems just a drop in the gaffe bucket. No wonder when he gaffes, the media tends to say, "Oh, that's just Joe Biden being Joe Biden."