Joe Biden Does It Again

On Monday Joe Biden said that President Obama "inherited the most difficult 100 days of any president, I would argue, including Franklin Roosevelt. It was clear the problem that Roosevelt inherited. This is a more complicated economic calculus. We’ve never, ever, ever been here before, here or in the world."

Peter Brown did a fine job in The Wall Street Journal’s Capital Journal blog explaining why this is just silly vis-à-vis Franklin Roosevelt, so I won’t go over that. But look at that statement again: "the most difficult 100 days of any president". Uh, did you say "the most difficult 100 days of any president," Mr. Biden? Actually, we just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of a president who I think had a slightly more difficult first 100 days than President Obama. I realize the AIG bonus brouhaha may be a big deal to some, but I sort of think that seven states leaving the Union before your inauguration and four more leaving right after your inauguration was a little tougher than anything President Obama has had to face.

Actually, this brings to mind a statement that then-Senator Biden made back in 2006 when he was getting ready to run for President. Senator Biden was in South Carolina, talking to the Columbia Rotary Club. To try to show he was one of them (I guess), he noted that Delaware was a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."

Could somebody please explain to me again why Joe Biden was so much better of a choice for vice president than his opponent?

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Update (3/22/09 8:30 p.m.):  I corrected "AGI" to "AIG" in the second paragraph.