IS JOE Biden a racist? Much of the leftish blogosphere (example) thinks so, because he apparently said this to the New York Observer, of Barack Obama:

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

Now, one mild charge is that Mr Biden is racist in the mild, unconscious way that causes people to use words like "articulate" and "clean" when describing a black senator, when it would never occur to most people to use them to describe a white senator.

Is this charge true? Here's Robert Guttman at the Huffington Post, describing two lily-white senators, one of whom carries the surname Biden:

Senator John McCain for the Republicans and Senator Joe Biden for the Democrats seem to be the most knowledgeable, articulate and concerned potential candidates who are speaking out on foreign policy issues...

What about "clean"? Here's NPR, describing Sam Brownback as "Mr Clean".

And "nice-looking"? Here's a fan of John Edwards, praising his favourite candidate:

However, I thought JRE showed Sean and his audience that progressive Democrats can actually be nice looking, charismatic and smart, too. In fact, better looking, more charismatic and smarter than Sean.

Fortunately, Mr Obama was classy enough not to take offence:

I didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.

But is Mr Obama even right in his analysis that Mr Biden called him the first articulate African-American politician, or presidential candidate? It depends on the analysis of what Mr Biden said. The crucial bit begins with "who is..." Is it what linguists call a restrictive clause, or is it a non-restrictive clause? In the restrictive interpretation, a major Democratic senator with 34 years of experience in the upper chamber was a big enough fool to say to a newspaper that Mr Obama was the first articulate (etc) big-time African-American.

But it is equally likely, if not far more so, that the way Mr Biden said this implied a non-restrictive clause like "The house, which is white, is for sale." Non-restrictive clauses are usually set off by a pair of commas in writing, and by a short pause in speech, to indicate that the bit in between is extra information, not meant to refer to one specific house, nor to imply that the politician so described is the only one referred to by the rest of the sentence.

This latter explanation makes way more sense: Joe Biden said something fair, praising and even true, and is not a fool racist.

UPDATE: The Observer has released audio. Give it a listen and note the long pause (not to mention a change in intonation) that indicates a non-restrictive clause. It seems more than obvious that Mr Biden was saying Mr Obama, the first mainstream African-American to run for president, is by the by also "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy". The addition of a humble comma would have made a mighty difference in this case. We think the Observer should correct the record.

UPDATE 2: Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, makes the point at Language Log more authoritatively than I could. Short version: Mr Biden was "misquoted". Meanwhile, the New York Timesamplifies the misquote hugely rather than checking its facts. Now, Mr Biden's candidacy may be seriously damaged before it really began. Pity. It's not clear that he'd make a great president, but the plain-spoken, entertaining foreign-policy expert would have a great effect on any campaign. His run shouldn't end with a non-gaffe.