America's Dumbest Is A Democrat

Josh has the latest fropm the Democrats' weird one.

Of Barack Obama, Biden says: "you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

And here are a couple of his past hits.

At a speech in South Carolina, he said Delaware was "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."

And this: "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

Jeebus! We found one dumber'n Bush and he's in our midst.

UPDATE: The Observer - the media outlet that reported the first Biden quote up above - has apparemntly transcribed the statement in a way to make it worse than it was. This is from Josh's latest update:

TPM Reader TC checks in from Texas ... "The debate shouldn't be comma or no comma. There's clearly a period after "African-American." In fact, the interviewer interjects his own "yeah" during the pause after "African-American," which is followed by another pause, after which Biden continues with "Who's bright . . . ." I don't like Biden much (I can't think of anyone who loves to hear himself talk quite as much as Biden), but there's no "gotcha" here at all."

UPDATE NO. 2: Kevin Drum gives us an accurate transcription from the audio:

Biden: I mean, you got the first, sorta, mainstream African-American.
Horowitz: Yeah.
Biden: Who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.

Not as bad but still stupid.

Obama gives a good response:

"I didn't take Senator Biden's comments personally, but obviously they are historically inaccurate. After all, we've had presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Mosely Braun and Al Sharpton. They gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns and no one would call them inarticulate."

Atrios gets it right in pointing out that Biden's view of what is "mainstream" really consists of being approved of by DC insiders like Biden. Atrios says:

No one should ever be surprised that outsider candidates of any kind are treated with disdain by Washington power brokers and High Pundits, but the fact that Washington insiders didn't want to have much to do with Jesse Jackson has little bearing on the fact that the guy had fairly broad appeal and managed to attract a hell of a lot of votes, quite possibly many more votes than Obama will eventually receive (this is not judgment or prediction, just highlighting the fact that no one's, you know, cast a vote for the guy yet). He certainly had, by the only measure which is really important, a hell of a lot more broad mainstream support than did the very serious mainstream Joe Lieberman.