President Biden shocked viewers of his Friday speech to teachers when he recognized an audience member and told the crowd, “She was 12, I was 30.”
Biden lit up social media with the confounding and seemingly inappropriate aside. He did not say what he did when he was 30 and the woman was a preteen.
“You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said mid-speech at the National Education Association headquarters in DC. “We go back a long way. She was 12, I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.”
The audience of teachers and union members laughed and cheered at the bawdy remark.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for clarification on what the president meant.
Biden’s historical habit of touching and smelling women and girls in public — often yielding on-camera grimaces from recipients — earned him the Republican nickname “Creepy Joe,” though he has rarely committed such actions in public since apologizing in 2019 to women who said he made them uncomfortable with unwanted physical contact.
The off-script line distracted from what was supposed to be Biden’s rebuttal to the Friday morning rollout of House Republicans’ “Commitment to America” campaign platform.
Speaking to the teachers union, Biden attempted to blame Republican support for gun ownership for distracting students from learning — rebutting GOP messaging that blames COVID-19 remote learning favored by unions and controversial school subjects, particularly on issues of racial and LGBT discrimination, that some Republicans attack.
“Gun violence is on the ballot,” Biden said. “The idea that you start school this year and kids in many parts of the country are learning to duck and cover … rather than talking about reading, writing and arithmetic is a very different circumstance and it’s not right.”
Biden called for an “assault weapons ban” while saying he uses his own shotguns for “target practice,” possibly referring to skeet shooting.
“I support the Second Amendment. I have two shotguns,” Biden said. “The only thing I ever really do is really target practice. I haven’t done that in a long time.”
Biden also directly referred to the House GOP “Commitment to America,” in which Republicans vowed to rein in government spending and inflation and push for a tougher approach to crime and border security — along with oversight of Biden’s administration.
“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went to Pennsylvania and unveiled what he calls a ‘Commitment to America.’ That’s a thin series of policy goals with little or no detail that he says Republicans to pursue if they regain control of Congress,” Biden said.
“In the course of nearly an hour, here’s a few of the things we didn’t hear: We didn’t hear him mention the right to choose [whether to have an abortion]. We didn’t hear him mention Medicare. We didn’t hear him mention Social Security,” Biden said.
“So let’s take a look at what Kevin said today. He said Republicans want to ‘preserve our constitution freedom.’ That sounds great. I’m for doing that as well, we all are. But look at what they’ve actually done: MAGA Republicans just cheered and embrace the first Supreme Court decision in our entire history … that actually took away a fundamental right.”
Biden went on to claim that some Republicans secretly support his policies — without saying specifically what policies.
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