setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East."

This was not the only time in the Stephanopoulos interview that Biden sucker-punched Obama. His follow-up addressed the failure of Obama's stimulus programme to halt the surge in unemployment and prompt recovery. In devising this programme, Biden confided to Stephanopoulos, the Obama administration had "misread" the extent of the economic catastrophe it inherited.

"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there." He added: "We misread how bad the economy was." You can imagine what the Limbaugh and the radio ranters made of that.

In stricken Ohio, Obama’s approval ratings have dropped into the thirtiesBiden fans, lolling on their Sunday morning couches, jumped up and punched high-fives to the heavens. Joe was back, more brazen than ever in his traditional blend of mendacious self-justification. His claim that the Obama administration and everyone else had misread the economy in late January was entirely untrue.

Obama and his economists were savaged by most liberal economists like Nobel prize-winners Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman for making the stimulus package far too small and the White House was accused of squandering irretrievable amounts of political capital.

These

critics were right and for this miscalculation Obama is now paying very heavily. In stricken Ohio, Obama's approval ratings have dropped into the thirties, according to one major poll.

So why did Biden embarrass his boss internationally and then rub his nose in a catastrophic economic misjudgment? The nose-rubbing isn't so hard to explain. Biden is a notorious flapjaw, as I wrote here when Obama picked him. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. He can always talk his way into a jam. He’s spent his political life doing it.

But the matter of crossing Obama on administration policy regarding Israel and Iran is more serious. Vice presidents are not supposed to contradict presidential policy.

Obama surely must be thinking - where is Dick Cheney, now that I need him? As Bush's Veep, Cheney gave his boss the limelight and kept his mouth shut for eight years. Everyone said he was really the man running the country.

No one thinks Biden is running the country, and maybe this is the core of Obama's Biden problem. Almost all politicians are narcissists, Biden more than most. It's why he has so often got into trouble for lying about his achievements. The vice-presidential slot is not calculated to make a narcissist happy. He dwells in another's shadow and scans his features hopefully for signs of ill-health.

Shrinks say that those suffering from narcissistic rage yearn, as Heinz Kohut once wrote, "to turn a passive experience into an active one." If this is true, then Obama can look forward to plenty of strenuous exercise hauling the vice president's foot out of his mouth. Obama's honeymoon phase is dwindling to a close. Biden will be there to signal the wrong turns and say that they weren't his fault.