Opinion

What Biden really said

Is Joe Biden everybody’s goofy uncle — or David Axlerod’s attack hand-puppet?

More the latter than the former, it would seem — with Exhibit A being the veep’s unsubtle race-baiting before a mostly black audience in Virginia on Tuesday.

Biden — affecting faux sub-Mason-Dixon accents — told the crowd Mitt Romney’s election would “put y’all back in chains.”

Hard to miss that message, especially when it’s delivered to African-Americans in Danville, Va. — the last capital of the Confederacy.

Of course, it’s probable that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is right when he says that Biden’s “just not very smart.

But how bright does Biden need to be to deliver a dog whistle when Axlerod and the rest of the Obama Chicago Mafia decide they need one? Not very.

Surely the president’s diminishing support with his bedrock core constituency — African-Americans — has his chief political operatives in a sweat.

A recent poll by the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling gives Romney 20 percent of the black vote in North Carolina — a state where Obama took 95 percent of black votes in 2008.

And where, as recently as May, he was winning 87 percent of those votes.

Polls in other states with a large black vote have shown similar results.

Why? Who knows?

We’d guess that the president’s “evolution” on gay marriage has disconcerted African-American social conservatives.

But for whatever reason, the decline — while marginal — is real.

And this is an election quite likely to be decided on the margins: Every vote will count, and stay-at-homes will hurt.

So Biden is trotted out to rattle the “chains” — his word.

Former Rep. Artur Davis — an African-American from Alabama who seconded Obama’s presidential nomination four years ago — sure got it.

Accusing Biden of “racial viciousness,” he added: “I know what Joe Biden was doing yesterday — and every black person in that room knew who the ‘y’all’ was, knew what the chains were about, knew what the metaphor was.”

Just Joe being Joe?

No. Just Joe being a cynical tool.