Advice for Biden
This piece by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic makes a good point:
[M]istakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he knelt to engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals.
That said, although Biden’s Mexico mistake might not be a demonstration of dementia, it is a warning sign of a different sort that his campaign would be wise to heed. Recently, the White House declined to have Biden participate in the traditional pre–Super Bowl interview this coming Sunday. The administration framed this decision as part of a broader strategy favoring nontraditional media, but it was reasonably seen as an attempt to shield the candidate from scrutiny. The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both real and fabricated—will feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized social-media clips of his slipups.
He has always been a gaffe machine. Always. Now it’s attributed to his age, a lie promulgated by the right and aided and abetted by the media jackels, as we saw at the press conference last night.
The press always complains about accessibility to the candidate/office holder. They were particularly brutal with Hillary Clinton on this subject, as I wrote here back in 2015. But they do it to all the candidates, particularly Democrats who are more often subject to their ire due to the pressure from the right wing propaganda machine. But in this case, I think Rosenberg is right. Biden is going to have to subject himself to this and show that he can take it. That’s what these political trials by combat are all about. Those who show resilience and toughness in the face of this sort of onslaught can often overcome the onslaught. Those who shy away from it invite more of it.
Biden’s mental faculties are fine. he’s no different than he always was in that way, which is a garrulous, rambling speaker whose mouth gets ahead of his brain. But he looks old and that’s what people are reacting to. It’s not relevant because all you have to do is look at his presidency to see that he is perfectly capable of doing the job. The Republicans know that which is why they are relying almost exclusively on this attack to neutralize the obvious problem they have with a corrupt, half-wit rapist at the top of their ticket.
The Democrats need to buck up right now and stop their whining on television about “the problem.” Biden’s old and there’s nothing they can do about it. He’s doing a good job and they need to make that case instead of this typical hand wringing. And I don’t know what to say about the political press. They are beyond hope I’m afraid. Their performance last night was as bad as any I’ve ever seen. I’m not the only one who thought so: