It's sad that our press spends so much time covering the misstatements by public figures. John Kerry's recent "botched joke," Hillary Clinton's supposed comparison of her husband to Osama bin Laden, and this week's blibber-blabber by Joe Biden all demonstrate how the well-coordinated, right-wing media machine can blow a slip of the tongue into a national crisis. There is a war on, after all. Normally, I would not take the time to comment on something of such petty nature, but the fact that Biden's unfortunately-phrased comment could derail the presidential campaign of a thoughtful senator tempts me to come to his defense. Spearheading the racial inquisition, is, of course, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Jason mentioned earlier that The Times reports that:

No stranger to electoral intrigue, Mr. Sharpton was quick to offer a political motive: That Mr. Biden was drawing distinctions between Mr. Obama and African-American leaders like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson, to "discredit Mr. Obama with his base."

The Rev. sure is a master decoder. Reading over the comments and their context, one does not have to be Alan Turing to see that Biden meant "clean" not in the way that Orrin Hatch used the term to distinguish gays from straights last summer (a genuine expression of latent bigotry noted on this blog by Michael Crowley), but to indicate that Obama is fresh and new with the potential to be a national black leader decidedly not of the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton school of hucksterism, shamelessness, and self-promotion. If that's what Biden meant, and it should be pretty obvious to all that is what he meant, then he has nothing to apologize for. --James Kirchick