Where's Biden?

Oh, where, oh, where has Joe Biden gone? He hasn’t done a national interview for 5 months.

Now just why would a vice-president of the United States eschew doing interviews for half a year? Let’s posit some hypotheses as to his invisibility:

1. He’s been overseas, traveling around apologizing for America. What? That’s already been done? Oh.
2. He’s been on the golf course, honing his game so he can impress Tiger Woods. What? Oh, really? Okay.
3. He’s shown an extraordinary gift for saying ridiculous and offensive statements that might endanger the career of 1) and 2) and so he’s being muzzled as much as humanly possible.

That last hypothesis seems to fit the circumstances. The last major national interview Biden did was on NBC’s Meet the Press, when he endorsed gay marriage and acted as a trial balloon for Barack Obama’s own coming-out party days later.

Since Paul Ryan was named Mitt Romney’s running mate, according to the Romney campaign, he has done 197 interviews, 153 of those on TV (29 National & 124 local/regional) with the rest being print or radio.

One Republican source gave a priceless explanation as to why the Obama campaign attempts to keep the gaffe-prone Biden in the closet:

Joe Biden gets used by the Obama Campaign like Bernie from ‘Weekend at Bernie’s. They drag him out to a battleground state, prop him up on a podium in front of a teleprompter, pose him for photos with locals, and then quickly roll him back to Air Force 2 before reporters have a chance to ask him questions. They want Biden to be seen, but not heard in any interviews because they’re afraid he might embarrass the president with another one of his hilarious gaffes.

In Weekend at Bernie’s, Bernie’s corpse has his toupee stapled to his head so it won’t come off. Since Biden already has plugs to cover his empty dome, perhaps the Obama campaign would rather he had his tongue stapled to the roof of his mouth.