From Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden on CBS News (video, starting at about 1:45):
Part of what a leader does is to instill confidence, is demonstrate that he or she knows what they’re talking about, and communicates to people, if you listen to me, and follow what I’m suggesting, we can fix this. When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on television, and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed, he said, look, here’s what happened.
As I’ve long said, these sorts of errors (here about what medium presidents were using to speak to the public in 1929, and even about exactly who was president in 1929) are inevitable when people speak extemporaneously, especially when they’re in the middle of a hectic campaign and probably not getting much sleep. All this shows about Senator Biden is that he makes errors just like all the rest of us. But it’s worth remembering incidents such as this one when people start mocking other candidates for similar slip-ups.
Thanks to Ben Smith (Politico) and Jesse Walker (Reason’s Hit & Run) for pointing this out, and to InstaPundit for the pointer to that post.