January 28, 2024

Human, All Too Human

The Unbearable Darkness of Being Joe Biden

“The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made.” Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor

In less then 290 days tthe American voters will likely determine the fate of the world not just in the near future, but for generations to come. Even though we still have many more months of campaigning and primaries, the choices available in November were clearly known for quite some time. Trump, regardless of his openly fascist rhetoric, regardless of 91 criminal indictments, a jury’s judgement of sexual assault… is the undisputed leader and standard-bearer of the Republican party. If there ever was a chance for another candidate, Nikki Hailey realized that she is running against Trump entirely too late. On the other side, as an incumbent, Biden was and clearly still is the presumed Democratic nominee1.

I am very much aware of all the other third party candidates officially running for the President of the United States, but let’s be real for a second, a vote for RFK Jr., Ye, Cornell West, Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson and whomever No Labels will end up finally nominating, is a vote for Trump. It seems ridiculous that at least for the 3rd straight election cycle the framing is that “the democracy is on the ballot.” Of course, there’s been plenty of hot takes that people are tuning out the message, as it becomes sort of “boy who cried wolf” stereotype. This story, is not about that, though, this story, is about one man, specifically, one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

When Biden finally decided to enter the Democratic primary in 2020 and swiftly started to win, I often heard and read a question that can simply be summed up as: what do people see in this old and boring guy? I’ll admit that before deciding to write this piece, I knew only the most basic facts about Biden, he was never someone I was interested in, either as a person or as a politician. I’ve kept up with being an informed voter but time and again, the perception of Biden that persists is he is an old-school down-to-earth guy who says the wrong stuff at all the wrong times, goofs around even during the State of the Union address and seems not to totally grasp the line between personal and professional. In many ways, he is a caricature from a tabloid, he is a total throwback to the times long gone.

Which is actually incredibly ironic, considering that the forces trying to bring him, and the rest of the world along with him, down are hell bent on taking us back at least 60 years to those long gone times of old-school open racism, misogyny and fascism.

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In many ways, yes, Biden is all of those things. You may have seen the recent and already debunked story from Fox about the alleged altercation between Biden and Bill Ackman at the SALT dinner in 2020.

According to the story, the fiery row started when Biden answered a question from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, inquiring why he didn’t run for president. Biden, supposedly, grew emotional, stating that he bowed out largely because of his son Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer in 2015.

“Why? That’s never stopped you before,” Ackman then called out, according to a blow-by-blow account of the exchange by Fox.

“Who is this asshole,” Biden reportedly asked. “Look, I don’t know who you are, wiseass, but never disrespect the memory of my dead son!” Biden told Ackman.

Ackman attempted an apology, but was told by Biden to “just shut the hell up.”

Here’s the thing, even though, the story is not true, reading it, I can clearly see how this could have happened exactly as Fox has reported. This is the lore of Biden, above all else, he is startlingly human.

Most successful politicians today are akin to the model created and perfected by Reagan, a marketing product fine-tuned through minute-by-minute sentiment and a complex algorithm of regression models that no one really seems to know or understand, whereas Biden is the complete opposite: he is awkward, often uncomfortable and, well old.

Biden never tried to hide or polish these rough edges of his personality or the perception of him, even as it got him into plenty of trouble over the years and in 2008, before he became Obama’s VP, it sure looked liked it almost certainly ended his political career. In his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden remembered his daughter Ashley’s response when Obama choose him as the vice presidential candidate: “Dad, this is hope and history.” Biden answered with a joke: “Oh, great. He’s hope. And I’m history.”

In his 2020 biography of Joe Biden, Evan Osnos says that Biden began memorizing poetry by William Butler Yeats as a teenager while working to overcome his stutter. Biden would stand in front of a mirror and speak lines from Yeats and Ralph Waldo Emerson, straining to avoid the contortion of his face muscles. As someone who has struggled with not just stutter but multiple speech impediments and auditory processing complex, I have an immense respect for Joe for his ability to deliver powerful public speeches without most of the world ever knowing about his disability. Biden would keep his affinity for Yeats for the rest of this life. As vice president, Osnos says, Biden quoted Yeats’ “Easter 1916" at least 20 times, especially the line, “The world has changed, changed utterly.” “

“Yeats and Heaney encompass so much of the universal catalog of emotions poetry can express and they are the major wells he (Biden) goes to when he needs the perfect words to encapsulate a feeling.” says former Biden speechwriter Dan Cluchey, who worked with the president from 2018-2022.

Politicians, especially those who have capacity to deliver great speeches, have often made it a point to cite a favorite writer, poet, philosopher, and for Biden that often has been Seamus Heaney, renowned for what Nobel judges in 1995 called “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth.”

It speaks volumes that that Biden's personality and history has never got scrubbed of its rough edges - it’s not who he is. He is as close to a real person as you will find in the halls of politics of today. and it is this wear-it-on-your-sleeve humanness that, makes the perception of the Joe Biden not just some distant political figure; but the weird “uncle” Joe next door, the guy who, whether you like it or not, would probably ruffle your hair and tell you to stop with the malarkey.

Of course, none of that excuses some of Biden's actions and statements in the past and the present, but for all the negative coverage he gets, his all-too-humanness is a very unique positive, too. Here’s Biden himself:

The most successful and happiest people I’ve known understand that a good life at its core is about being personal.  It’s about being engaged. It’s about being there for a friend or a colleague when they're injured or in an accident, remembering the birthdays, congratulating them on their marriage, celebrating the birth of their child. It’s about being available to them when they're going through personal loss. It’s about loving someone more than yourself, as one of your speakers have already mentioned. It all seems to get down to being personal.

Empathetic. Personal. Remarkably human.

Write this on the whiteboard a myriad times: a lot of people don’t like Joe Biden. Yet, comes November, with their backs to the wall, they will break to the one who scares them less. Between open fascism and Biden’s humanity, it’s not even a debate who they will choose. I will say this again as clearly as possible: based on what we know today, if the elections were tomorrow, Biden would win, likely in a landslide.

However, the elections are not tomorrow.

Yes, Biden has not had a single major scandal so far in his administration. His his policy record is long and successful. He’s presiding over the strongest economy in decades. None of it matters because the universal media signal across all bands is “he’s old and senile and you should hate him.”

But we know, even before he confused Nikki Hailey and Nancy Pelosi, that Trump’s cognitive2 abilities are as questionable as Bidens, if not more. I am not even sure it’s worth spending more than two sentences on this.

We’ve all heard plenty about the economic anxiety of the Trump voters, alas, it is also a myth, Trump’s base is largely uneducated rural born-again whites but, there’s enough support from the well off establishment to make this into a myth:

I spent a lot of 2023 (and 2022 for that matter) wondering why the public sentiment regarding the economy was so low, in stark contrast to the reality of facts. It is impossible to overstate how much of a consensus a recession was for most of the past couple of years.

It’s not impossible to see a random doomsday hot take on economy even now and yet, GDP has outperformed even the pre-COVID CBO forecast, even after adjusting for inflation.

Even after the myriad of layoffs across industries in 2023 and already in 2024, the jobs market is hopping. Even if we discount the decline in jobs in 2022 for Trump and similarly, not give credit to Biden for the initial recovery, the economy still created more jobs in 2 years under him than in 3 years of the “greatest economy” under Trump:

Even the inflation has declined to acceptable levels.3

I’ve wondered for quite a long time why is there such divergence between economic signals and the reactions of those who are one way or another at the helm of our economy4.

In other words, the interest rates hikes, likely only increased the inflation, so thanks Federal Reserve! What about the public sphere, you may ask? Unlike the inflation, that obviously had a lot of very logical and reasonable explanations, beyond the ever present stupidity of austerity, it is same as always: billionaires doing their best to monopolize markets, increase revenues and price gouge us. It’s nothing more than pure greed. It’s very curious and telling that Wall Street is not backing Biden, even while the market is at an all-time high and the data shows the economy is booming. All of this, while Joe Biden is President.

Until I saw this quote from Stephanie Ruhle, an MSNBC host:”

“They think he’s (Biden) super liberal, which he’s not. And the reason they have this idea is because when they got into investment banking… those investment banks only recruited from four colleges and they were Ivy League universities and they didn’t have any DEI initiatives. And they loved to hire lacrosse players, and football players and sons of people that went to really expensive boarding schools. And that is why that group of Wall Street people think that Joe Biden is super liberal because their son name Chad in a Patagonia vest isn’t automatically getting into Princeton…”

We’ll get back to DEI initiatives and the far-right war on it another day, it’s a topic I’ve been itching to write for a while, for now, let’s get back to Biden.

The other day, I saw this tweet from Mehdi Hassan:

So, do Dems realize that this is going to happen to him at all the events he does between now & Nov? And that - obviously - it’s a bad look for him? Have Biden’s folks studied the LBJ precedent? Does a prez with a strong domestic record want to risk throwing it all away for Bibi?

https://x.com/katierogers/status/1750241971514273898?s=20

As someone who studied protests against the Vietnam War, I remembered the chant and the song, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?!” While the analogy between LBJ and Biden is far from imperfect Medhi has a point that we will see more and more pro-Palestinian protesters at any and all Biden events5.

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The Pro-Palestinian sentiment is quite strong. As of this writing the following has called for immediate ceasefire include: Arizona & Texas Democratic parties; roughly 80% of Democrats; over 50% of all Americans, etc. Reversely, and in contrast to the popular belief, the Civil Rights Movement was never popular at the time. It was successful, because it was necessary and because LBJ knew the right pressure points on Capitol Hill and traded all of his remaining political capital to get the Civil Rights Acts passed. But, it was never publicly popular. In May 1964, as the CRA was being debated, 74% of Americans said mass demonstrations "hurt the Negros' cause."

Similarly, after Governor Abbott’s proclamation of invasion and essentially declaration of secession that was signed by 25 other Republican governors. I’ve already seen calls from the left that Biden must nationalize Texas National Guard, that this is the moment not unlike when President Eisenhower sent National Guard and 101st Airborne to Little Rock.

Let’s look at the facts though: the Civil War6 started when Lincoln got elected and the south absolutely freaked out over it because Lincoln believed slavery should be phased out over time. It was an aspiration with no definitive date. He wasn't willing to split the union over the issue. Slavery was the top issue in the 1860 election. Lincoln ran on a promise not to induct more slave states and to allow it to remain legal where it already was. He believed that it would become non-viable (eventually) and was content to let it ride out the clock for decades.

Lincoln wasn't particularly progressive on the issue. His primary goal was always to hold the union together with a secondary one to set the conditions for slavery to end some day in the indefinite future.

I have no way of knowing what Biden must be thinking about immigration, the Southern Border or the Palestine. Yet, I believe him to be a very empathetic and human person and if I am right, it must be tearing him apart inside. Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more voices on the left suggesting that maybe the "smart" thing to do is to abandon Biden and let Trump get elected, to show the Democratic Party that it needs to better represent their interests. Not only is this dangerous, it is absolutely wrong and illogical.

I don’t have particular high hopes for the 2nd Biden term. However, without it and without a functioning Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress, this country is doomed and a whole lot faster than any of you ever imagined (and that’s besides Trump):

A while ago, Biden said: "There comes a time maybe every 6, 8 generations where the world changes in a very short time. We are at that time now, and I think what happens in the next 2-3 years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next 5 or 6 decades."

He is absolutely right. He is not a perfect man. He is not a perfect human being. He is not a perfect politician. But he is a perfect choice for the perfect role, as an imperfect human for an imperfect time in the most perfect coincidence in the universe because is human, all too human… and I am scared shitless that his humanity and his empathy will get the best of him and he will step down, because it’s the right thing to do in his mind.

I never pray, but I do pray that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. finds the courage and, and yes, humanity and humility to see this through and give us one last hope for salvation.