Vice President Joe Biden has announced his travel plans for the 2012 campaign, and they will take him to five states where most of the critical swing voters are white Americans.
The campaign’s decision keeps the gaffe-prone Biden away from southern states that have a high proportion of Hispanic swing voters, including North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada and New Mexico.
“It’s bad news for all of you in those states, but Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida is where I’m going to be spending most of my time,” Biden joked at a retreat of Democratic legislators in Cambridge, Md.
The southern states will be targeted by President Barack Obama and more suitable surrogates, such as members of the Hispanic legislators and cabinet members, including Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
To win in November, the Obama campaign is hoping to first rally its base among African-Americans, government employees, progressives and gays. But it will also be important for the president to boost turnout among Hispanics in southern states, and to win over working-class white voters in critical northern states.
Obama’s campaign is going after the white swing vote by touting federal government support for manufacturing, veterans and the military.
Biden is a good messenger to white swing voters because he was born in Scranton, Pa., before moving to Delaware with his Catholic family. He was a high school athlete, and his father sold autos for a living in Delaware after they left Pennsylvania amid an economic downturn. He was also a college athlete before he earned his law degree. (RELATED: Full coverage of Joe Biden)
This campaign’s decision to keep Biden in the north also insulates the president from Biden’s propensity for campaign-trail gaffes.
Yesterday, for example, Biden briefly imitated an Indian call-center worker, complete with an awkward accent. The episode has reminded observers of his June 2006 claim that “you cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. … I’m not joking.”
Watch Joe Biden talk about Indians who work at 7-11:
The vice president’s most famous gaffe came at Obama’s expense in 2007, when he gushed that Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Biden has acknowledged his propensity for public-speaking disaster, and now describes some of his comments as “Bidenisms.” On Friday, for example, he described government lending to students as “trickle-down government.”
He then bolstered his reputation by acknowledging that the Obama administration is so unpopular that it threatens the re-election of some Democratic legislators.
“I’m prepared to go campaign for you anywhere,” he told the Democratic politicians. “If it helps you to be against you, I’ll be against you. If it helps to be for you, I‘ll be for you, because we cannot succeed unless you all come back.”