Although the focus on impeachment has distracted the press from covering former Vice President Joe Biden’s many gaffes, he once again suffered from confusion about his location on Saturday while campaigning in Iowa.
The Washington Examiner reported that Biden momentarily indicated that he thought he was in Ohio. “How many unsafe bridges do you still have here in the state of Ohio? I mean Iowa,” Biden said. “I was just in Ohio. Because they have more.”
Tarini Parti of the Wall Street Journal tweeted that some in the crowd appeared frustrated by the mistake.
At the fish fry in Cedar Rapids, Biden says he’s in Ohio instead of Iowa. Quickly corrects himself but I spotted some in the crowd shaking their heads.
— Tarini Parti (@tparti) November 2, 2019
“It happens a lot”
While it isn’t uncommon for something unexpected to pop out of a person’s mouth even if they know where they are, this latest episode might signal a more serious problem for Biden.
With all the attention his campaign trail gaffes have received in recent months, it only seems logical that Biden would be making a maximum effort to get everything right.
Biden’s campaign staff should at the very least be coaching him on his actual geographic location before each and every appearance, making sure he knows and has practiced the name of the locality in which he will speak. The fact that he is still commiting these types of gaffes at this point in the primary race says he may be having a harder time keeping it together than anyone previously suspected.
Cedar Rapids event attendee Kathleen Tupker was willing to give Biden a pass this time around, however, saying “it happens a lot.”
“He corrected himself right away,” said the stay-at-home mother from Marion, Iowa. “There were a few giggles from the audience. It wasn’t super pronounced.”
Under the gun
If he hadn’t already been called on the carpet enough times for similar embarrassments during this campaign to make his poll numbers falter, one might be willing to overlook this most recent error. However, given the intense scrutiny he is now facing, Biden is under the gun to prove that he isn’t too old to be president.
Biden needs to do that by shutting down the gaffe machine once and for all, not by permitting these kinds of slips to repeatedly occur. The fact that he apparently has little control over them says something important about his mental state and his fitness for the presidency.
It does seem that voters are beginning to appreciate that between Biden’s gaffes and his possible exposure in the Ukraine controversy, he might already be too damaged to secure his party’s nomination, let alone win the White House.
Given how flawed the entire Democratic field is, however, many voters on the left may still view Biden as the lesser of many other evils who are bent on wreaking liberal havoc on the country.
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