Do Biden's Gaffes Matter Anymore?

Our famously gaffe-prone vice president, Joe Biden, has outdone himself. He stumbled through not one, not two, but three gaffes in less than 24 hours. For him, that's a personal best, or, more accurately, a personal worst.

Yet, if it is better to be criticized than ignored in politics, he can take little comfort from the way that hardly anyone outside of the Republican National Committee, whose website called it "Gaffetastic," seemed to care.

Although Biden has not announced whether he might run for his boss's job in 2016, it seems more than coincidence that his latest dustups occurred on a speaking tour in Iowa, a big pond these days for presidential hopefuls testing the water for 2016.

In a Tuesday speech, he made unfortunate news by referring to unscrupulous lenders of bad loans to military service members as "Shylocks." That term, derived from a Jewish character in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," has long been viewed as an ethnic slur.

The next day in Des Moines, only hours after apologizing for the Shylock remark, he referred to Asia as "the Orient." Among others, Ninio Fetalvo, the Republican National Committee Asian American and Pacific Islander spokesman, denounced that usage as "offensive to both Asian-Americans and our Asian allies abroad" for its " disrespectful" and "unacceptable imperialist undertones."

Later that day, as reports of his two-in-one-day gaffe-fest streamed out, he made a third. Answering a reporter's question, he raised the possibility that the United States might commit ground troops, also called "boots on the ground," and not just airstrikes to fight the Islamic State in Iraq. "We'll determine that," he told a reporter, "based on how the effort goes."

With that, he rhetorically opened a door of military possibilities that the Obama administration has tried mightily to keep shut.

Yet major TV newscasts ignored these controversial eruptions, according to conservative media watchdogs. The conservative NewsBusters site quoted commentators on liberal-leaning MSNBC who seemed to excuse Biden's gaffes as sounding "real" and "authentic," raising charges of a double standard by the usual suspects in the allegedly liberal mainstream media.

"Why didn't the media dismiss (former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah) Palin's faux pas as just part of her 'being real'?" one viewer commented.

Media bias? Maybe. But the thought that the gaffe-prone Palin, charmer that she is, could have been a heartbeat from the presidency instead of Biden does not fill me with confidence, either.

I think Biden's remarks raised hardly a ripple for other reasons that tell us more about his political future, or lack of it. Hillary Clinton has not officially announced her candidacy either, but she obviously is laying the groundwork with a non-campaign campaign, beginning with her recent book tour.

Early polls show the former secretary of state way ahead in Iowa and nationally. A Sept. 12 CNN/ORC poll shows her to be the choice of 53 percent of Iowa Democratic voters, way ahead of Biden's 15 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren's 7 percent.

Biden's importance as a newsmaker, even as a gaffe-maker, is being overshadowed by the air of inevitability surrounding the former secretary of state.

Besides, as gaffes go, Biden's endless stream tends to reinforce an old media narrative of him as the dotty old uncle whom everybody puts up with because you know he means no harm.

Even in the letter of complaint from Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, about Biden's Shylock remark, Foxman praised Biden as "friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant" as an individual.

As Rebecca Nelson at the National Journal reported, Biden's approvals have remained remarkably static during his vice presidency, despite more than enough gaffes to fill a "top ten" list on Time's website.

Media narratives feed on themselves. Since Biden has no record of antipathy toward any group, except maybe some Republicans here and there, his racial-ethnic blunders haven't had much traction.

Of course, that could change if his presidential aspirations show any chance of becoming reality. For now, however, he appears to be too trapped by his past reputation for shooting from the lip to make his remarks do much more than energize his partisan rivals.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.