Joe Biden’s Foot-in-Mouth Disease Was Working Overtime at the Atlanta Democratic Debate

From Esquire

In the pantheon of presidential debate clown show moments, nothing will ever measure up to Donald Trump's no-problem hands. But Joe Biden was determined to make his mark Wednesday night in Atlanta. He started off a bit rocky, with a couple moments in his opening answer where he seemed to short-circuit a bit. Then the ex-VP settled down well enough as the proceedings mellowed out into Very Civil Discourse. He spoke with some authority on foreign policy. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders demanded that Democrats take on insurance and drug companies and then incredibly worked in a discussion of Palestinian youth unemployment. Pete Buttigieg started rattling off answers he clearly practiced extensively in front of the mirror. All was well.

But then they got to a discussion of combatting domestic violence, which should have been comfortable enough ground for Biden. He did, as he said, help craft the original Violence Against Women Act. But at some point in his answer, Biden lost his way. Like, really lost it, in quite a big way. He said there's no situation where "a man has a right to raise a hand in anger against a woman other than in self-defense, and that rarely ever occurs." Then he said we have to "punch at" the problem.

That was nothing, though. The main event was still to come, albeit because Cory Booker decided to take a turn attacking him over his position on legalizing weed.

It does seem that Biden has supported decriminalizing marijuana for some time, but that's really taking a back seat at this point. "I come out of that Obama coalition," he said. "I come out of the black community, in terms of my support." Then he claimed he had the support of "the only African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate," which is not true, and which Booker and Kamala Harris pointed out readily. Harris, after all, is an African-American woman in the Senate who does not support Biden. Then he tried to salvage it with "the first!"

It was classic Biden foot-in-mouth disease, a hallmark of his three presidential runs, but it remains to be seen if any of this matters. Harris left a serious mark on Biden in the first debate, but it had no long-term effect. The former vice president had the support of half of black voters in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the crucial voting bloc in all-important South Carolina. Maybe gaffes are just gaffes, particularly in the age of Trump.

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