How Can Politicians Be So Clueless?

It was painful reading about Joe Biden trying to ingratiate himself to some South Carolina Republicans by saying:

Delaware ... was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

So, Biden was joking about how Delaware was just as pro-slavery as the South, and would have liked to fight with them during the Civil War. This is getting close to Trent Lott territory, here. Not quite there, but close