Biden’s rocky start to 2016

It’s been a rough week for Vice President Biden — and a rocky start to his nascent 2016 hopes. 

The vice president has long been prone to a few gaffes, but Biden made a trio of statements over the past few days that all drew ire from various groups.

{mosads}While telling a story about his son providing legal assistance to fellow soldiers after they returned from war, he called people who gave veterans bad loans “shylocks,” a Shakespearean reference that is generally recognized as an anti-Semitic slur. 

A day later, he used “the Orient” as a substitute for Asia — a term some find offensive — and also seemed to briefly waver on the president’s plan to not put U.S. troops on the front lines in the fight against ISIS. 

And while reminiscing at a Democratic women’s event Friday, Biden said he missed senators who would partner with Democrats, like former Sen. Bill Packwood (R-Ore.). But Packwood resigned in 1994 amid sexual misconduct allegations, a deviation from his otherwise forceful denunciation of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Though the rapid string of gaffes this week was notable, the vice president is no stranger to sticking his foot in his mouth. He’s asked a wheelchair-bound state senator to stand up, gotten caught on a hot-mic using strong words to describe the importance of the Affordable Care Act, and said during the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton was “as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president,” among other moments.

“When you speak a lot, chances are, you misspeak,” Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Hill. “The test for me is when people make a mistake, do they go into a bunker and blame everybody else or do they own up to it [and apologize]?”

Foxman, who leads the group that fights against anti-Semitism, described Biden as the latter. He said that the vice president immediately called him to apologize and discuss his mistake in his Tuesday speech. That led to a cordial statement by the group publicly praising Biden for “turning a rhetorical gaffe into a teachable moment.”

Biden hasn’t publicly addressed the other statements yet. But White House press secretary Josh Earnest deflected the Packwood remark, saying that the vice president “has a stronger record, probably than anybody else in Washington, D.C., when it comes to his decades of leadership on issues related to combating violence against women.”

As a senator, Biden sponsored the Violence Against Women Act and helped shepherd it to become law in 1994. This week, he’s helped commemorated its 20th anniversary.  

While Biden’s recent history suggests that he’ll recover from the missteps scot-free, things may be different if he decides to take one last swing on the campaign trail. 

Democrats have largely focused on whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will enter the 2016 presidential race, but Biden has suggested that he’s interested in running once more. He briefly ran in 2008 before being picked as Obama’s running mate, and his 1988 presidential campaign was cut short due to a plagiarism scandal.

In April, statistician and journalist Nate Silver took a look at gaffes and found that while political science shows “their impact is usually overstated by those who cover campaigns,” missteps that rally the opposing party’s base can shift momentum.

David Yepsen, a veteran Des Moines Register reporter who covered the Iowa caucuses for years, said that while people cut Biden a fair amount of slack thanks to the goodwill he’s built up over the years, his gaffes would have a much stronger impact on the campaign trail. 

“You get out there in a presidential campaign, that scrutiny just gets white hot,” Yepsen said. “At the minimum, it’s a distraction. Every campaign has a message it wants to get out and any time Biden does that, it’s going to distract from whatever his message of the day is.”

Yepsen, who now the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, added that the magnifying glass of a presidential campaign could amplify a mistake and hurt his or Democrats’ chances. 

But for now, Biden remains a Democratic darling. Despite his misstep, the entire room gave him a loud standing ovation when he finished speaking. And in Yepsen’s mind, his gaffes are “pretty harmless in a vice president.”

“He stubs his toe and he apologizes, and life goes on,” he said. “Everybody says, ‘Oh that’s just Joe.’”