Joe Biden asked voters to imagine it would have been like if Barack Obama had been assassinated when he became the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and what it would have done to the country. The thought came about during a recent town hall meeting be held in New Hampshire while the 2020 presidential candidate and former vice president discussed how the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy affected his own life.
“My two political heroes were MLK and Bobby Kennedy. My senior semester, they were both shot and killed,” Biden recalled during a health care town hall at Dartmouth College. “Imagine if, God forbid, Barack Obama had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee. What would have happened in America?”
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A Biden campaign official told CNN that Biden has made a similar comment about Obama before.ions to people who may not have been alive at the time.
“It was a jarring point to raise on a day the Biden campaign had sought to capitalize on Biden’s partnership with the former president, on the 11th anniversary of Obama announcing Biden as his choice to serve as vice president,” NBC News reported.
Some chalked the remarks up to Biden’s history of verbal gaffes.
“Only three days earlier at an event in Iowa, Biden initially misstated the decade in which Kennedy and King had been shot, initially saying in the 1970s instead of 1968,” NBC News reported.
