Smart, thoughtful, experienced, a first-rate legislator who’s usually on the correct side (my side, that is) of the issues, yet given to multiple mouthy mishaps. Joe Biden talks too much and too long and his words get ahead of his brain and he spends weeks apologizing for his gaffes instead of sharing his more worthy ideas.

Right out of the box this year, declaring for the presidency, the six-term senator from Delaware called Barack Obama “articulate” and noted the guy was “clean.” Not as bad as Bill O’Reilly’s amazement at the fact that people at a black restaurant were “normal,” but stupidly patronizing.

The triage experts in the media immediately wrote him off and he’s lived up to their expectations ever since. Came up with a doozy several weeks ago with some Comedy-Channel-style comment about Indian accents behind the counters at 7–11 stores.

Does he still wonder why the press has written him off, and—although he gets Sunday morning TV face-time galore—he’s not covered as a serious contender? Consequently, a guy with substantial credentials and pleasing personality counts his polling percentage on one hand with the thumb left over.

On the other hand, the guy does look somewhat presidential and we’ve seen him operating progressively and professionally through the years. He was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when the extreme right-wing intellectual Robert Bork came before it as a nominee for the U. S. Supreme Court and was ultimately rejected. Biden also chaired the committee during the unfortunate hearings when Clarence Thomas was applying for the gig—but they failed to bork him. (Biden may generally have yakked too much at both events.)

He introduced much significant anticrime legislation, notably authoring the Violence Against Women Act.

He also played a serious role as senior Democrat and now chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, first branding Slobodan Milosevic as a “war criminal,” then making strong moves to help bring peace to the former Yugoslavian pieces.

He clearly slipped up after supporting the Afghanistan invasion, going along with Bush on the Iraq war—though he was among the first to apologize for that.

His current Iraq proposal makes some sense: essentially create a soft partition of the country, dividing it into three quasi-autonomous zones and cutting the bereft Sunnis into the oil profits. He wants a fairly fast withdrawal but would, with most others, leave some troops behind.

If there is ever a “settlement” in Iraq, it may actually wind up along those lines.

He is certainly not going to be nominated—and if he rises in the polls opponents will brandish the ultimate weapon against him: Running for president in 1988 Biden gave a speech plagiarized from the British Labor candidate Neal Kinnock. In one important filmed instance, he not only stole Kinnock’s words without attribution, but his biography.

Opponents today will say: At a time when honesty in government is so important, how can you vote for a known liar?

So Joe stays in the race in hopes of being named secretary of state. If Clinton is elected, Richard Holbrook is most likely to get the job—so Biden feels safe leading the attack against Hillary for being divisive and unelectable.

Are you listening Barack?

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Don Rose, a longtime leader in the grassroots liberal movement, is a commentator. journalist and former adviser to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,