Last week, I wrote about reports that allies of Joe Biden were trying to get his campaign to scale back his appearances due to the large amount of gaffes he’d made in recent weeks.
The belief was that he was more prone to committing gaffes later in the day when he was tired, and that cutting back on campaign stops would make him less likely to flub. It was an idea that was ripped by, among others, former President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod.
Perhaps the most troubling among the gaffes were the comments he made on August 10th about the Parkland kids visiting him “when I was vice president”:
The frontrunner to become the Democratic presidential candidate told reporters in Iowa on Saturday that “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president.” But when they went to Capitol Hill, lawmakers were “basically cowering, not wanting to see them. They did not want to face it on camera.” The problem with this tale? The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead took place in 2018, more than a year after Biden left the White House.
He actually made the remarks twice that day. Watch:
Joe Biden mistakenly say he was VP during 2018 Parkland shooting: “Those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president.” https://t.co/lqgqRXj5Ys pic.twitter.com/YDDZR73ydT
— The Hill (@thehill) August 12, 2019
Fresh off of a week of vacationing in Delaware, Biden was in Iowa on Tuesday and attempted to explain away his remarks about Parkland. It did not go well:
Speaking at a campaign event, Biden said he “was still called vice president” when he met with the students from Parkland.
“I also met with the kids from Parkland, in the Capitol,” Biden said. “I was still called vice president, but it was in ’18.”
His memory of the event, however, remains incomplete.
“They asked me to come speak to them in the rotunda,” Biden said, before pausing to think.
“I think it was the rotunda, it was one of the buildings, or one of the rooms in the Capitol,” he said.
It’s sounds even worse than it reads. Watch the video:
“I was still called vice president”? SMH. He’s still called vice president now.
Whoever wrote this for him to say should be suspended from campaign duties for a couple of weeks to get them to consider how ridiculous it came cross. If they were trying to definitively rebut rumors that Biden was having trouble handling the day to day rough and tumble of the campaign trail, they failed – and failed bigly.
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— Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter. –
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