I'm a sucker
A couple months ago, when the media was last in a tizzy about Joe Biden’s age, I wrote a post coming to his defense. After yesterday’s debate performance, I am now embarrassed that I did. I’ve been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster since the debate yesterday, so today’s missive is unapologetically therapeutic. I’m working through some stuff right now. But I figured this was worth putting out in public, so that those who are on basically the same page as me can perhaps benefit from my reflections. And so that those who have disagreed with me about Biden can get a better sense of where I’ve been coming from.
I like Joe Biden a lot. He’s not perfect, and I disagree with some of the decisions he’s made. But I think he’s been basically a good president, very good even. He’s vastly better than Trump, and if Biden doesn’t drop out of the race soon — which I sincerely hope he does — I’ll support him enthusiastically in November.
But those basic facts about Biden’s presidency and my support for him have made me more inclined to accept the more rosy interpretations of the various video clips that have been circling for a year or more that suggest Biden is slipping into senescence. I didn’t want to think that he’d deteriorated substantially, and so I convinced myself that he hadn’t. Of course, I’d seen the clips. I knew how he looked. But it’s not hard to put together a clip show of everyone’s worst moments that will make them look much more confused than they really are. I guarantee that, if cameras were on me 24/7, you could put together a reel of every moment where I was spaced out for a few seconds that, together, made me look like an absolute potato. Same for anyone. And that’s what the Republicans were doing to Biden as the 2024 election approached.
Why think that? Well, it makes sense. That’s a completely unsurprising political tactic for anyone to take. Kind of sleazy, but politics ain’t beanbag, and that’s just a punch you have to roll with if you’re running for office as an octogenarian. And I heard a constant drumbeat from Democratic party insiders and well-connected pundits that Biden was totally sharp, completely on top of his game. Now that was obviously spin in the other direction. Biden is old and had clearly lost a step. So I kind of averaged those two lines of spin out and figured that Biden was slowing down a bit but still basically competent. It might take him a second or two longer to spit it out, but he could string sentences together!
So when I tuned into the debate yesterday, I didn’t know what to expect. But I had a rough sense of what we’d get from Biden. He’d sound hoarse and whispery, like usual. His delivery would be a bit stilted, like usual. But he’d hit his marks, say the attack lines he’d rehearsed, throw in a couple “listen, Jack”s, and that would be that. A solid, if uninspiring, performance.
That’s not what I saw. Biden mumbled incomprehensibly. He lost his train of thought repeatedly. One sentence rarely followed logically from the next. It was painful to watch. When we got to the now-infamous point, about ten minutes in, where Biden totally lost his line of thought and stammered for ten agonizing seconds before finishing with “We finally beat Medicaid,” I had to pause the livestream I was watching and just stare into space for a minute. He was in far worse shape than I had expected. I was shocked.
Today, Democratic operatives have been spinning furiously, showing clips from a rally he did after the debate and an event earlier today. He looks a lot better in those clips. “See? This is who Biden really is!” And I’m sorry, but fuck you. Because Biden is the cogent guy we see in the clips circling today. But he’s also the guy who couldn’t string two sentences together with Trump onstage last night. Those are both who Biden really is.
Decline from age is not a linear thing. As people get older, they have good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments. As the clips of Biden at rallies show, he’s not the senile vegetable that Republicans have been saying he is. But he’s very very obviously on the slope of decline. And as his debate performance last night shows, he’s farther down that slope than we’d been led to believe.
I’m actually angry. I’m angry at myself, of course, for seeing what I wanted to see, and for thinking I had a larger share of the truth because I wasn’t completely buying the Democratic spin. But I’m even angrier at the Democratic operatives who have been saying consistently, repeatedly, that Biden is really fine. Because he’s not; they were lying. They were lying because that’s their job. But it is not an honorable job. I thought they had more shame than that. I thought they would be more swayed by their basic responsibility to the truth and to the American people to give an approximately-accurate account of the mental state of the US President. They did not, and I still believed them. I’m a sucker; mea cupla. But also, how dare you?
Those same Democratic operatives are out in force trying to say that last night’s performance by Biden wasn’t really that bad, and that out of some sort of loyalty we owe it to them to pretend that everything is fine, the show goes on, and we’ll beat Trump again in November. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul: fuck you. As I said at the top, if it’s Biden and Trump in November, I’ll support Biden without a second thought. Trump is a monster. But I’m profoundly embarrassed that I gave those shitty little politicos an ounce of trust on such a vitally important issue. It’s a mistake I don’t plan to repeat.