Joe Biden reveals he put a dead dog on a Republican’s doorstep

‘I’ve gotten much better since then,’ quips the president

President Joe Biden has recalled a humorous moment that occurred when he was a county councilman in the 1970s during an event with representatives of county-level governments from around the country.

Speaking at the National Association of Counties 2022 Legislative Conference on Tuesday evening in Washington, the president described what happened when a woman in a “very wealthy neighborhood” in his district called Mr Biden, then a New Castle County councilman in his late 20s or early 30s, to deal with a deceased pet on her front lawn.

“I represented a middle-class district to a working-class district, but there was one very wealthy neighborhood,” said the president, according to a White House transcript.

“And I got a call one night; the woman said to me — obviously not of the same persuasion as I was, politically — called me and said, ’There’s a dead dog on my lawn.’”

Mr Biden said after unsuccessfully negotiating with the woman to have the problem dealt with in the morning, he was forced to go over to her house and deal with it personally — albeit in a very unconventional manner.

“So, I went over...I picked it up. She said, ‘I want it out of my front yard,’” Mr Biden recalled.

“I put it on her doorstep,” he continued, to laughter from the assembled county executives.

The anecdote was yet another example of the personable manner with which Mr Biden has approached supporters and friendly audiences throughout the years, a manner of speaking that has sometimes landed him in trouble as he veers off topic to tell tales that sometimes leave reporters and his fellow politicians scratching their heads.

One now-famous example of his tendency to bring up topics that his communications staff would likely wish he hadn’t mentioned was a 2017 address in which Mr Biden described a showdown at a pool with a local gangster dubbed “Corn Pop”.

At one point ahead of his 2020 bid for president, Mr Biden acknowledged the tendency himself as a weakness, but contrasted it to the frequent falsehoods and conspiracy theories spread by Donald Trump.

“I am a gaffe machine,” Biden said in 2018. “But my God what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth.”