Frontrunner cannot shrug off his ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden baggage

Even as he was savouring his moment of transformation into the role of frontrunner, Joe Biden was still being Joe Biden.

Joe Biden flanked by wife Jil and sister Valerie Biden Owens in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

Even as he was savouring his moment of transformation into the role of Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden was still being Joe Biden: he muddled up his wife and sister in his big Super Tuesday speech.

“By the way, this is my little sister Valerie,” he said, grabbing his wife Jill’s hand, as she gesticulated that she was not, in fact, Valerie Biden Owens. “And I’m Joe’s husband,” he added, reaching for Valerie.

Realising his mistake, he exclaimed: “They switched on me!”

What could be more Joe Biden than this: a silly error, a strange verbal jumble, followed by a half-baked explanation?

It was proof, if any were needed, that the night’s impressive victories, the large number of top-notch endorsements and the rout of his centrist rivals had not fundamentally changed the candidate.

Of course, Doanld Trump will still dismiss him as Sleepy Joe, or Creepy Joe for the examples of young women who have made clear that they were uncomfortable to be cuddled or have their hair smelt by the former vice-president.

Mr Trump and his supporters will also spend the next few months pumping up the theory that Mr Biden will be sidelined if he takes the White House, with the agenda being set by the hard left.

He rehearsed some lines of attac­k at a rally in North Carolina on Monday. “Sleepy Joe, he doesn’t even know where he is, what he’s doing or what office he’s running for,” he told his audience.

“It doesn’t matter, you know — maybe he gets in, but he’s not going to be running it. They’re going to put him into a home and other peopl­e are going to be running the country, and they’re going to be super-left radical crazies.”

Mr Biden has been more open about his lifelong struggle with stuttering, which causes his staccato speech pattern and can be ­offered as an explanation for other verbal gaffes.

The muddles have flowed, however­, as the wrong words keep popping­ into Biden sentences, which Mr Trump has seized upon as evidence of mental decline.

In the recent TV debate he said that 150 million Americans had been killed by gun violence since 2007, rather than 150,000, and at a big dinner speech in South Caro­lina he said he was running for the Senate not the White House.

Mr Biden comes with baggage but a large number of Democrats have swung behind him anyway, because poll after poll suggests he has a good chance of beating Mr Trump — and because he is not Bernie Sanders.

YouGov put him at 50 per cent and Mr Trump at 41 per cent in a national head-to-head, with Mr Biden ahead in key states that ­Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 such as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

However, that poll and others still leave Senator Sanders room to make the case that he too can beat Mr Trump. The veteran leftwinger was given a 49-42 advantage over Mr Trump nationally, and 48- 45 in battleground states.

This is the calculation for liberal Democrats: dare they take the greater risk of losing to Mr Trump in exchange for the potential prize of Senator Sanders’s revolutionary health, climate and tax policies?

The Times