Quoting Vice President Biden is like a grown-up playing basketball at a hoop meant for a four-year old — you will score a slam dunk every time, and it gets old fast. But today the problematic thing he said was actually instructive. He was in Wisconsin, where he and the president have been relentlessly beating the bushes for money and enthusiasm among the Democratic faithful. According to the Hill, here’s what happened:

“We want to reward people who manufacture things in the United States, in Wisconsin, not to take them overseas to China and to other countries!” he said to a silent room at the event for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tom Barrett, according to a White House pool report.

He continued, saying, “You’re the dullest audience I’ve ever spoken to,” at which point he got applause and laughs. “Do you realize how many jobs Wisconsin lost? It’s staggering!”

Biden didn’t get the response he wanted to his demagogic rabble-rousing nonsense about jobs going overseas–something his administration, like its predecessors, has absolutely no control over nor any coherent policy ideas about reversing. His audience knows that; indeed, his audience was almost certainly made up of businesspeople who know better than he about it and why it happens — and why government “rewards” aren’t going to solve the problem. Frustrated, he browbeats them for refusing to respond. And, as will happen, they respond to the browbeating.

The sense one gets, reading these accounts of Biden’s and Obama’s travels, is that they have yet to come to grips with the deep skepticism they generate when they talk about the economy, even among their own supporters. When they do sense the skepticism, it confuses them because they seem to assume it should only be coming from bad Republicans and conservatives who are supposedly obsessed with seeing them fail for no other reason than that these bad people want Obama to suffer.

And so the guy on stage heckles his audience when his bit bombs. Whew. Who knows what more will come out of their mouths for the next three and a half weeks until the polls open and bring a blessed end to the slow-motion car wreck that is Biden-Obama midterm electioneering.