Joe Biden gaffe: VP forgets that Barack Obama is the president

VP Joe Biden, who has previously misremembered what state and what century he was in, now seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is the president.

Speaking to a crowd of 1,200 people at a high school in Lakewood, Ohio, Joe Biden was slamming a “pernicious” Mitt Romney ad claiming that Jeep will move jobs out of Ohio to China.

The vice-president said that the ad claimed that “President Clinton bankrupted Chrysler so that Italians could buy it to ship jobs overseas to China”.

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the U.S. and left office in January 2001. Barack Obama became the 44th president in January 2009 and for the past nearly 4 years Joe Biden has served as his vice-president.

In Joe Biden’s defence, there was perhaps a Freudian element to the slip. Bill Clinton, who previously enjoyed testy relations with Barack Obama, has been mobilized by the current president to be his most prominent campaigner and the two men made joint appearances in Virginia on Saturday and New Hampshire on Sunday.

Joe Biden’s gaffes are numerous and legendary in political circles. He recently referred to Tim Kaine, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and the current Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, as “Tom”.

On a previous stop in Ohio, Joe Biden complained to an audience in the town of Marion about television ads “here in Iowa”. In Danville, Virginia, he declared: “We can win North Carolina!”

In August, Joe Biden asked a Blacksburg, Virginia crowd: “Folks, where’s it written we cannot lead the world in the 20th Century in making automobiles?”

The 20th Century ended on December 31st 1999, nearly 27 years after Joe Biden first took his seat in the U.S. Senate and almost 9 years before he became vice-president.

Last week, Joe Biden joked about his gaffes while at the same time putting a slightly more favorable gloss on his mixing up Ohio and Iowa.

Speaking to campaign volunteers in Davenport, Iowa, Joe Biden said: “I’ve been living in Ohio like I used to live in Iowa. As a matter of fact, I got in trouble [with] the press, which never points out any mistake I make. I was in Ohio talking about it and saying <<it’s good to be here in Ohio>> and then I said <<and in Iowa>>.”