Behind affable old Joe’s blinding white teeth is a demagogue par excellence.

Tweet

Vice President Joe Biden seemed so close to jumping into the 2016 presidential race. Washington had been abuzz this week with rumors that the three-time failed presidential candidate was certain to jump in the fray, that he was ready to go, that it was practically a mortal lock.

So much for rumors. Looks like the fourth time won’t be the charm.

On Wednesday, Biden appeared in the White House Rose Garden with President Obama by his side to let the nation down. Again.

“Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time — the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” Biden said. “But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent. I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”

Biden’s announcement doubtless had editorial cartoonists, columnists, TV pundits and radio talkers sobbing across the land. (Oh, and to be sure, there are disappointed Democrats out there who sincerely wanted to vote for him.) Most politicians have the gift of gab, and Biden certain has that. But he’s also got the gift of gaffe — and that’s what sets the man apart.

Sometimes Joe’s utterances are the Platonic ideal of demagoguery. He can be feisty. He can be maudlin. He can be smarmy. But Journalist Richard Ben Cramer put it best in his account of the 1988 presidential campaign, What it Takes: “Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it.”

And still doesn’t, apparently.

Earlier this week, Biden appeared at a forum with former vice president and fellow failed Oval Office aspirant Walter Mondale, where he offered some insight into the daring 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden.

Biden was among the group of close advisors who helped President Obama weigh his options and assess the possible risks of striking the world’s most wanted terrorist deep within an ostensible ally’s sovereign territory.

“As we walked out of the room and we walked upstairs, I told [the president] my opinion that I thought he should go but to follow his own instincts,” Biden said. “But it would have been a mistake, imagine if I had said in front of everyone, ‘don't go, or go,’ and his decision was a different decision. It undercuts that relationship. So I never, on a difficult issue, never say what I think finally until I go up in the Oval with him alone.”

It was an incredible revelation. Literally incredible. As in, unbelievable, unconvincing and highly dubious.

Because Biden has been telling a different story for years. As he told in in 2012, the president was going around the table, asking his national security advisors, generals, and top cabinet officials — including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — what he should do.

“He got to me. He said, ‘Joe, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.’ I said, 'We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.'”

“Don’t go” or “imagine if I had said in front of everyone, ‘don't go, or go.’” Well, which is it? Who’s right? Biden 2012 or Biden 2015?

For what it’s worth, Clinton tells a version similar to Biden’s older story in her much-discussed, little-read memoir, Hard Choices. President Obama could confirm Biden’s new and improved account if he wanted. Instead, White House spokesman Josh Earnest ducked reporters’ questions the other day. “I was not in the room when these decisions were being made or when the president was consulting his advisers about this very difficult foreign policy call that he made,” he said.

Biden does like to change his story now and again. When he ran for president the last time, Biden told the late TV newsman Tim Russert in a 2007 interview that, “I have changed my mind, but I haven’t changed my mind in any fundamental way…” about his support for the Iraq War. Like John Kerry in 2004, Biden was for the war before he was against it.

But that’s good old Joe, hail-fellow well met, the guy The Onion likes to portray as an affable rogue who washes his Trans Am shirtless in the White House driveway. Politico on Wednesday reposted an April 2014 story highlighting the “best Biden gaffes, slip-ups, uncomfortable truths and plain old bloopers.” Republican, Democrat or Independent — everyone loves “Joe being Joe.” (Well, almost everyone.)

“If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty,” Biden said of the $787 billion stimulus in 2009, “there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”

“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking,” Biden joked in 2006.

“Look, John [McCain’s] last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs,” he said a few weeks before the 2008 election, when people still had time to change their minds.

Everyone loves a good laugh. But people forget what a mountebank Biden was and remains.

True, many people remember (because we’ll never let him forget) that Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential election after he was caught plagiarizing a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.

But people forget how Biden in 1997 claimed credit for ending the genocide in Bosnia two years earlier. Of course, President Bill Clinton may have had something to do with it, along with former ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnia War, and all of other senators who voted for the intervention. Politifact judged Biden’s boast “mostly false.”

People forget about Biden’s disgraceful slanders against Robert Bork and his “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas when both were nominated for the Supreme Court. Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Bork’s confirmation hearings in 1987.

“It appears to me that you are saying that the government has as much right to control a married couple's decision about choosing to have a child or not, as that government has a right to control the public utility’s right to pollute the air,” Biden accused — and that was before the judge had been asked a question!

Biden upped his scurrilous performance in 1991, when he allowed the Thomas hearings to degenerate into personal attacks and claims that the judge had sexually harassed his subordinates at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was Biden who made Thomas’s chief accuser, law professor Anita Hill, a household name.

In 2001, Biden said: “I think that the only reason Clarence Thomas is on the court is because he is black. I don’t believe he could have won had he been white.”

(Not coincidentally, stories began appearing last month that some Democrats are sore with Biden for being too lenient with Thomas and not doing a better job of protecting Hill from Republicans’ questions.)

Ancient history? Biden showed then, and many times afterward, that he is not a man of his word and that he will say anything — lie, flip-flip, distort, spin, stretch, defame — if it suits his agenda. Behind affable old Joe’s blinding white teeth is a demagogue par excellence. His campaign antics would have been entertaining — up to the point he had a serious chance of winning.