(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) In yet another gaffe, President Joe Biden on Monday referred to former Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as his “predecessor,” PJ Media reported.
Biden, 81, made his claim during a visit to Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he discussed matters like inflation and the decline of the middle class throughout his tenure.
The president led off his remarks by recalling his past friendship with McCain, who Biden initially claimed died on Sunday. McCain died in August 2018.
“Last night—not long ago, my buddy John McCain passed away,” Biden mumbled before calling the deceased senator “my predecessor and friend who went—that’s how we ended his career.”
Oddly, Biden used the word “predecessor” repeatedly in his State of the Union address last week to describe his current campaign rival, former President Donald Trump, who had a bitter intra-party rivalry with McCain, the failed 2008 GOP presidential nominee.
Biden and McCain spent many years in the U.S. Senate together, both ran for president, shared a mutual dislike of Trump, and both garnered reputations for their quick tempers in private while cultivating benign and grandfatherly-like public personas.
Still, it was unclear in what specifc capacity McCain may have preceded Biden, other than in death.
Political insiders previously speculated that Biden might withdraw from the race sometime around May.
Although former first lady Michelle Obama, a perennial subject of speculation, recently reaffirmed her decision not to run, Biden’s sudden withdrawal—particularly if he were to have a terminal illness—would drastically shift the political dynamics of the race.
It thus would be anyone’s guess how Democrats might seek to capitalize on the sudden change of fortunes and the dire need not to let Vice President Kamala Harris be the default nominee.
McCain joins the likes of former German leader Helmut Kohl and French leader François Mitterrand—who both led their respective countries in the 1980s and ’90s—on the list of long deceased figures Biden claims to have recently spoken with.
But in the case of McCain, the ailing chief executive may not be the only one with a short and/or selective memory about the relationship that the two longtime lawmakers shared.
Indeed, although Biden and the McCain family tried during the late RINO’s funeral and the 2020 Democratic National Convention to craft a narrative about their deep and abiding cameraderie, Biden was not always loyal to McCain.
Running against him in 2008, as the vice president candidate for Barack Obama, Biden said that McCain was nothing more than “an angry man” who had elected to take “the low road to the highest office in the land.”
As, Obama himself smeared McCain with allegations of racism for taking advantage of his “funny name” and the fact that “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” Biden let his good friend take the heat.
But once the acrimonious race was over and McCain was a useful idiot to the cause, the mainstream media memory-holed their past animosity to emphasize how bipartisan niceties of yore defined American politics in the pre-Trump era.
For example, Time journalist Mark Salter published a 2020 piece just before the election on the alleged Biden–McCain friendship which was supposed to show “how politics is supposed to work.”
“Joe Biden and John McCain were colleagues and friends, their friendship dating back to the 1970s, when Biden was a young senator and Captain McCain was the Navy’s liaison officer to the Senate,” Salter wrote.
More recently, Biden himself appealed to their friendship and ideological agreement.
Quoting McCain directly, Biden said, “We are citizens of the world, the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.”
