Obama campaign scrambles to cover for Biden

Barack Obama’s campaign on Tuesday scrambled to dampen the impact of a statement from Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden about the Illinois senator being tested early in his first term. 

Sensing an opening, Republican rival John McCain has pounced on Sen. Biden’s (Del.) remarks at a fundraiser.

{mosads}“This weekend, Sen. Biden guaranteed that if Sen. Obama is elected, we will have an international crisis to test America’s new president,” Sen. McCain (Ariz.) said in Pennsylvania Tuesday. “We don’t want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars.”

Biden said on Sunday that “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.”

He added: “Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Spokesmen for Obama sought to downplay Biden’s statement on the morning talk shows, hoping to change the story line by saying that the vice presidential nominee was only stating the obvious. However, they did not discuss the portion of the Delaware senator’s statement in which he said a crisis would be “generated.”

“Joe Biden is a plain-spoken guy. And what he was saying was something that’s obvious,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said on MSNBC. “We have an economy that’s in crisis. We’re fighting two wars around the world.”

Also on MSNBC, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs said that “the next president is going to be tested,” adding, “I don’t think anybody that picks up a newspaper or turns on the television, that watches the news on MSNBC would believe that the next president's going to have it easy from Day One.”

With two weeks to go before Election Day, Republicans hope the Biden comment will help them stem the tide of polls in battleground states that give Obama a clearer path to victory than McCain.

Speaking on Fox News, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who ran against McCain in the GOP primary but now supports him, said “in a way, I don’t know if Joe Biden intended it, but it seems to me he made a very strong argument for not voting for his candidate and voting for John McCain.”