In anticipation of a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden to Tokyo last December, Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese paper, prepared its readers. “He may be having the time of his life, but many around him fear he might get carried away and say something outrageous,” an editorial explained. “Biden is known to have made slips of the tongue, but that apparently is also what makes him affable and interesting.”
If Biden could redo the past few weeks, he would probably settle for being a little less interesting. On September 16th, during a speech at the Legal Service Corporation’s fortieth anniversary, the Vice-President talked about soldiers who have been hounded by debt collectors even during deployments. He condemned the “Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” In footage of the speech, his gaze then sweeps across the audience, and, judging from the flicker that passes across his face, one senses that he glimpsed a familiar hint that he may have devoured another heaping portion of his foot.
“Action is eloquence,” Shakespeare wrote in “Coriolanus,” just a few years after he wrote “The Merchant of Venice,” the play that established a Shylock as a reliable slur. Within a few hours, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, said, “Shylock represents the medieval stereotype about Jews and remains an offensive characterization to this day.” Because Biden is a longtime supporter of the Jewish community, Foxman was in a bit of a fix, so he sought to place the Vice-President’s podiatric self-cannibalization into the proper context: “When someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice-President Joe Biden, uses the term ‘Shylocked’ to describe unscrupulous money lenders dealing with service men and women, we see once again how deeply embedded this stereotype about Jews is in society.” (Biden soon apologized for “a poor choice of words.”)
Biden’s uncomfortable autumn was just beginning. The next day, at a kickoff event in Des Moines for the Nuns on the Bus “We the People, We the Voters” tour, Biden praised Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew as “the wisest man in the Orient.” The “Orient” and “oriental” may still be used when referring to carpets, or in the names of schools, but not for places, and certainly not with regard to people. Ninio Fetalvo, the Republican National Committee Asian-American and Pacific Islander spokesman, said that Biden’s comment was “not only disrespectful but also uses unacceptable imperialist undertones.”
Then, last week, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Biden finished his formal remarks and went free range when a student asked whether the U.S. should have intervened earlier in Syria. “Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” Biden said. “The Turks were great friends, and I have a great relationship with Erdoğan, [whom] I just spent a lot of time with, [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, et cetera. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad, and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad–except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were Al Nusra, and Al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.”
Erdoğan demanded an apology and called his relationship with Biden “history.” Biden apologized to Erdoğan two days later, and has been apologizing to everyone else ever since.
Under the conventions of politics, once is flub; often is a flaw. Biden’s misadventures, which tend to strike when he ventures “off prompter,” as his staff calls it, feed on one another, because the pattern is already in place. Over the years (and in preparation for a piece on Biden), I have come to diagnose a few distinct sources of Biden’s troubles.
The most common is the Biden crime of passion. In March, during a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, he was talking about health-care reform with reporters outside Butterfield’s Pancake House, when he spotted a young woman on a bench and bounded over to enlist her as a prop, pitching her on the need to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act: “Do it for your parents! Give them peace of mind!” he implored. After he had moved on, she explained to reporters that she couldn’t sign up because she was a tourist visiting from Canada. (“I just didn’t know if I should say.”) Some of this is just salty. On April 29th, in a White House event on protecting students from sexual assault, Biden said that, where he came from, when “a man raised his hand to a woman, you had the job to kick the living crap out of him if he did it. Excuse my language.”
The second is Biden’s intermittent interest in precision, a tendency that began in childhood and was reinforced during his tenure in the United States Senate. As a kid, Biden was no scholar. In his memoir, he wrote, “Joe Biden wasn’t hitting the library on very many Saturday nights.” That fed an intellectual insecurity that lingers and nudges him to grasp a bit too lustily at a statistic, or to plunge headlong into the classics. (After the Shylock moment, Foxman said, “Joe and I agreed that perhaps he needs to bone up on his Shakespeare.”) In a commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania in May, for instance, he hailed American workers as “three times as productive as any worker in the world.” (By most measurements, we trail Norway and Ireland.) During his thirty-four years as a senator from Delaware, Biden, like many of his peers, did not receive constant attention, despite his best efforts. Therefore, most of what he said went unrecorded, and so his words inhabited a happy no man’s land between quality and quantity. If he said something unfortunate, it was generally swept away in the ambient wind produced by his colleagues. Once he was tapped as a V.P. candidate, his statements were parsed.
The last category, and one that has never actually served him well in Washington, is a tendency to say things that are true. This causes him trouble at work, because honesty in American politics is taken as an absence of self-control. And, given his position, Biden’s candor can have high stakes—as it did with Erdoğan.
In describing the role of America’s regional allies in Syria, Biden was largely correct. The U.S. has publicly called on the Turks to seal their border to jihadists en route to Syria, and experts do not question that money from Gulf countries has ended up in the hands of militant extremists there. Andrew J. Tabler, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Times’s Mark Landler that “there are factual mistakes, and then there are political mistakes”—and Biden’s was the latter.
Biden’s off-the-cuff moments at Harvard distracted us from what was, not incidentally, an important speech, in which he drew connections between crises—ISIS, Ukraine, Ebola—and the territorial tensions in East Asia. Building on President Obama’s speech at the United Nations, which invoked the importance of a “language of force” in dealing with ISIS, Biden called for other kinds of active response: strengthening NATO, and helping “small nations resist the blackmail and coercion of larger powers using new asymmetric weapons” (a reference to Russia and China). He described a new era defined by an “incredible diffusion of power within states and among states that has led to greater instability” requiring “a global response involving more players, more diverse players than ever before.”
When I spoke to Biden this spring, he told me, “It’s probably better that they think I make off-the-cuff comments. I don’t say very much I don’t really think through. I know that sounds inconsistent with Joe Biden.”
The Vice-President’s twilight war with his words is not likely to end soon, in part because, curiously, his speechifying is something of a private triumph in itself. As a child, he had a crippling stutter. He was nearly in college before he put it behind him and discovered, to his surprise, that he could give a decent speech. Importantly, and a bit ominously, he learned that keeping his crowd meant going off script. He wrote, “I could watch an audience for their reaction. If I felt myself losing them, I would extemporize, tell a joke, focus in on a single person who wasn’t paying attention and call him out. I fell in love with the idea of being able to sway a jury—and being able to see it happen right before my eyes.”
