What Sen. Joe Biden intended to do Wednesday was to declare his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. And he did.

But he did more than that.

Instead, Biden took the 2008 stage with a decidedly less-than-presidential conference call on his website, talking over loud echoes and a blaring TV set, struggling to explain bizarre comments he made about one member of the Democratic field.

His description of Sen. Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” raised eyebrows, and was not how Joe Biden envisioned his candidacy beginning.

Biden, admitting he had been quoted accurately, volunteered that he had called Obama to express regret that his remarks had been taken out of context and that Obama had assured him he had nothing to explain.

“Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican candidate has produced at least since I’ve been around,” he said. “Call Senator Obama. He knew what I meant by it. The idea was very straightforward and simple. This guy is something brand new that nobody has seen before.”

“My mother has an expression: Clean as a whistle and sharp as a tack,” he said, ironically trying to undo his gaffe by showering ample praise on one of his biggest obstacles to winning his party’s nomination.

But what did Biden mean in his use of the word “clean”?

“He understood exactly what I meant,” said Biden. “I have no doubt that Jesse Jackson and every other black leader - Al Sharpton and the rest - will know exactly what I meant.”

When asked again what he meant, Biden bristled as he struggled over echoes and feedback that made it sound as if he were talking from a street corner in Baghdad, the New York Times reports, rather than his office on Capitol Hill.

Ah, the Internets.

“I’m not going to repeat everything I just said. There’s a vote that starts at 2:30, it takes 11 minutes to get to the floor. I can take one more question but not on the subject I have already spoken to,” he said.

After taking one more question, Biden did something entirely out of character and announced he was done talking.

Asked several times about Biden’s initial remarks, Obama released this statement late in the day:

“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.”

Jackson and Sharpton, both of whom are African-American men who have run for president before, were parsing Biden’s words carefully.

Biden’s assurances notwithstanding, both had no idea what Biden meant. Neither said they had heard from Biden by late Wednesday, and both men suggested they felt at least a little offended by the remarks.

Jackson described Biden’s remarks, which included disparaging remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, as “blabbering bluster.”

A wounded note to his voice, Jackson told the New York Observer that he had run against Biden in the 1988 Democratic nominating contest - and lasted a lot longer, and drew many more votes.

In truth, Biden was forced to drop out after acknowledging plagiarizing parts of a speech from a British politician, beginning a long political rehabilitation process that had elevated him to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had emboldened him to run for president again.

“I am not sure what he means. Ask him to explain what he meant,” Jackson said. “I’m calling his office. I want to ask him, ‘what do you mean?” because it’s open to much interpretation. I have the highest regards for Joe Biden. I don’t know whether it was attempt to diminish what I had done in ‘88, or to say Barack Obama is all style and no substance. It’s a kind of babbling bluster because he’s swiping at Hillary about the cap on American troops, he’s swiping at Edwards.”

Sharpton seemed just as mystified.

“It shows a cultural bias because what is he saying: That Shirley Chisholm and Jesse and I - who probably made the best received speeches at the Democratic conventions - were not articulate?”

No stranger to political intrigue, given his many years playing in New York political circles, Sharpton was quick to offer a political motive:

That Biden was trying, by drawing obvious distinctions between Obama and African-American leaders like Sharpton and Jackson, to “discredit Obama with his base,” at a time when he has already been the subject of newspaper stories questioning the extent to which he identified with African-American politics.