Joe Biden met with the editors of the Washington Post yesterday and sounded off on a variety of topics (this is Joe Biden after all):

"There's a reluctance I think on the part of Democrats to just straightforwardly state where they are on some fairly controversial issues, because they think the American people are not prepared to, quote, take the medicine."

"My road to success is Iowa," Biden said. "It's the only level playing field left out there."

"The bottom line is that no one in the country knows me," Biden said. "They know Joe Biden if they watch Sunday morning shows. Or occasionally turn on C-Span. But absent that, they don't know much about me at all." Biden added, "If I were able to raise 50, 60, 70 million dollars, then things would be different."

[On Bill Richardson] "Managing three million people qualifies you to go out and be president of a country with 300 million people? That's like saying I ran my lemonade stand but I can take over running McDonald's worldwide."

"This may be the only time in modern American history where the skill set coming out of the United States Senate is more valuable than the skill set coming out of being a governor."

But Post reporter Shailagh Murray writes that Biden "stumbled" while discussing public education in D.C. Here's what Biden said:

"There's less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," said Biden.

"When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there's no books, where the mother from the time they're born doesn't talk to them -- as opposed to the mother in Iowa who's sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300 word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom," Biden said.

Biden, writes Murray, left the "impression that he believed one reason so many Washington D.C. schools fail is the city's high minority population." Well, yes, Biden could have been clearer on that, but Murray makes it sound as if Biden had said minorities are dumber than white people, which is ridiculous. In any case, Biden's campaign quickly clarified that the senator was making a "socio-economic" distinction, not a racial one.