A gaffe or a political statement, agreed with your team of foreign and security policy strategists? Beyond the question that many have asked themselves, in Washington and Moscow, about the real meaning of “I think so” with which the American president replied to the interviewer who, during Good Morning America, asked him if Vladimir Putin was a murderer , Joe Biden has left an equally long trail of blunders behind him in his nearly 50-year political career. So much so that Biden himself, a few years ago, admitted to being a “gaffe machine”.
In the past, Biden has offered his condolences for people still alive, such as when as Vice President he commemorated the mother of the Irish Premier, still alive.In 2010, at the signing ceremony of the health reform at the White House he said enthusiastically, with the microphone still on, “This is a big F … Bill”.
“If we do everything correctly, if we do it with absolute certainty, there is always a 30 percent chance that there is something wrong,” he later said, dangerously defying the laws of elementary statistics, in a 2009 Democratic caucus. . In 2008, however, he invited Missouri State Senator Chuck Graham, in a wheelchair, “to get up”. “Get up Chuck, let me see you.”
“Hillary Clinton is qualified, or more qualified than I am, to be Vice President of the United States. Let’s face it: she is a very special friend. She is qualified to be President of the United States, so she is easily qualified to be Vice President. . Frankly, it could have been a better choice than I was, “he said at a Barack Obama campaign rally in September 2008.
In 1987, to a teacher who asked him which university he attended, Biden replied: “I think I have a much higher IQ than yours” by listing a list of academic degrees that also turned out to be false. “In Delaware, there is the largest increase in Indian immigrants. You can’t go to a 7-eleven or a Dunkin ‘Donuts without having a slight Indian flare and I’m not kidding,” he said in 2006, infuriating the American community. Indian origin.
During the 2007 Democratic primary campaign, he spoke of Obama as the “first mainstream African American capable of expressing himself, brilliant and clean.” “There’s this idea that if you’re poor you can’t do it. Poor kids are just as smart and talented as white kids,” another of his ‘bombshell’ statements.
The American administration may have wanted to signal a decisive change of pace in relations with Russia, perhaps triggered by the new revelations of national intelligence or thought for some time, but the story of Biden’s gaffes in his public interventions, in the absence of clarifications, cannot rule out the hypothesis of a slip.