Meanwhile, with the press breathlessly caught up in the president’s college hoopla, Vice President Biden quietly slipped off to New York on Thursday and somberly delivered a major foreign policy speech that mostly slipped under the media’s radar except for its attacks on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s lack of foreign policy experience.

Coverage of the speech was so low key that reports of a young woman spilling yogurt on the president’s pants during a stop at a Boulder, Colo., student hangout got more publicity than Biden’s far more important talk.

What’s wrong with this picture?

At first glance, one might think the president and the vice president somehow got their roles reversed. It seems a no-brainer that the commander-in-chief would make the major foreign policy speech and the vice president would be dispatched to carry the less-important message on student loans. But that’s not the way things work in Obama Land, where re-election is Job One. And the key to re-election is to avoid putting the president too far out front on foreign policy, especially regarding the war in Afghanistan. Obama shuns talking publicly about Afghanistan — as if uttering the word might give him the measles.