Biden wears tan suit almost exactly 7 years after right-wing media made Obama wearing one into a scandal

• Biden wore a tan suit almost seven years after conservatives criticized Obama for wearing one.

• A Republican congressman at the time said Obama's suit sent the wrong message to ISIS.

• And the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs called the suit "shocking."

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On August 28, 2014 - a date which will live in infamy - President Barack Obama wore a tan suit. Republicans and right-wing media treated it as a massive scandal.

Almost exactly seven years later, President Joe Biden boldly followed in Obama's footsteps and put on a tan suit.

Biden donned the suit during Obama's birthday week. The former president turned 60 on Wednesday.

Obama nearly always wore gray or dark blue suits. But when he broke from this trend, conservatives swiftly condemned him as unpresidential.

Then-GOP Rep. Peter T. King was particularly upset. "There's no way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday," King said at the time during an interview on Newsmax TV.

Obama wore the tan suit during a news conference at the White House, during which he discussed ISIS, among other topics. King felt the suit sent the wrong message to the terrorist group.

"ISIS is watching," King said. "If you were the head of ISIS, if you were Baghdadi, if you were anyone in the ISIS, would you come away from yesterday afraid of the United States? Would you be afraid that the United States was going to use all its power to crush ISIS? Or would you think here's a person who's going to go out and do a few fundraisers over the Labor Day weekend?"

King in a separate interview with CNN said that the tan suit reflected a "lack of seriousness."

The Fox Business host Lou Dobbs responded to the tan suit by stating that it "was shocking to a lot of people." Dobbs suggested that Obama wore the suit because his administration was getting "desperate" over low polling numbers (Obama's approval rating at the time stood at 41%, according to Gallup).

Responding to the criticism of the tan suit, then-White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, "The president stands squarely behind the decision that he made yesterday to wear his summer suit at yesterday's news conference."

"It's the Thursday before Labor Day. He feels pretty good about it," Earnest added.

Years later, Obama joked about "tan suit gate" during a press conference. "I was sorely tempted to wear a tan suit today for my last press conference. But Michelle, whose fashion sense is a little better than mine, tells me that's not appropriate in January," Obama said in 2017.

Some political commentators have been heavily critical of the mainstream media's treatment of the tan-suit hoopla, suggesting that it was presented as the only scandal during Obama's presidency and contending that this effectively whitewashed real controversies during his tenure - such as the administration's drone war and the civilian casualties that resulted from US strikes.

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