From behind the wall

2019

A conversation I’ve been engaged in with Burning Madoff inspired me to turn off the Java function in my Safari browser and access the locked, 2019 New York Magazine article by Olivia Nuzzi on Biden’s then-faltering campaign. It’s far more generous towards the senile old crook than her current article is, (“The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden”)and kinda-sorta defends his age and memory, but it stands out, to me, because there were few other, if any, mainstream media reporters willing to write on the subject: *

VISION 2020 OCT. 27, 2019

The Zombie Campaign

Joe Biden is the least formidable front-runner ever. Will it matter?

By Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent

Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old. He dresses neatly and always in blue. Staff envelop him. There’s the body man, the advance man, the videographer, the photographer, the digital director, the traveling chief of staff, the traveling press secretary, the local press secretary, the adviser, the other adviser, the adviser’s adviser, the surrogate, the other surrogate, and the bodyguard.

The looming presence of the last guy, Jim, is especially important for optics. Jim is tall and official-looking. He greets the world chest-first, his hands resting in a dignified clasp, his expression even, his mouth unmoving. Most people assume that he’s a Secret Service agent. Which he was.

But ex-VPs don’t get security for life the way ex-presidents do. Most people don’t know that, not even the politically savvy types who attend these sorts of things. And that’s all for the best, because Jim — or whatever local guy they’ve got filling in for him in Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada or wherever else — is a necessary component of the vibe they’re trying to generate here, the Big Presidential Energy, if you will, that powers this production.

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But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.

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Many of them treat Biden’s talking as yet another symptom of his age, but Biden has always been like this. “His major defect is that he goes on and on and on,” Orrin Hatch told the Washington Post in 1986, when Biden was 43. To say he overcame his childhood stutter would be a bad joke, like one of those I BEAT ANOREXIA T-shirts they sell on the Jersey boardwalk in size XXXL.

In Des Moines, in August, he told a crowd, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Realizing what he’d done, he tried to correct himself. “Wealthy kids,” he said, “black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.” Two weeks later, in Keene, New Hampshire, he said, “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it? And what a neat town. This is sort of a scenic, beautiful town.” (When he returned to New Hampshire the following month, a protester held a sign that read WELCOME TO VERMONT, JOE.) And so on.

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And then there’s Hunter Biden himself, who was going to become an issue one way or another. The 49-year-old son of privilege and tragedy, he has had struggles with addiction and run-ins with the law that have been well-documented. The campaign did its best to control the subject, cooperating with a tell-all interview over the summer in which Hunter candidly discussed his drug use and his relationship with his brother’s widow. This is sometimes how flacks think they’ll get ahead of a story: You neuter the shock value by delivering the shock yourself. But when your son is a central character in an impeachment saga likely to preoccupy all of Washington and political news for six months, it’s a hard thing to get ahead of, especially when you don’t really seem to want to engage.

“It’s sort of bewildering,” Axelrod says. “I guess I understand it from a familial, psychological sense. It would just be so much better if he stated the obvious: Even Hunter has said he exercised poor judgment. He won’t even say what his kid said. It’s an obvious question as to why the rules that he’s going to apply in the future didn’t apply in the past. All this was foreseeable … You can’t say, ‘He did nothing wrong,’ and, ‘He’ll never do it again.’ Those things don’t go together. Biden can be stubborn. I think his stubbornness is showing here.” All of that said, Axelrod added, “what Trump is doing is loathsome and outrageous because there’s no evidence that Biden did anything wrong or that Hunter did anything wrong.”

[How’d that turn out, David?]

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(FWIW) Biden was doing this for years: the use of personal tragedy and manipulation of details to meet specific circumstances; we’ve seen it repeatedly over the past four years:

In September, somebody had the bright idea to stage an afternoon event under the open sky at the Indian Creek Nature Center in sunny Cedar Rapids. It was the day after news of the whistle-blower broke, but Biden stuck to the event’s topic, climate change, addressing all the usual themes. Then faces began turning upward to the birds overhead. Somebody from Showtime’s The Circus told me the birds were bald eagles, but at the time I thought they looked like hawks, which, I guess, is a sort of glass-half-empty or -half-full dilemma. Eventually, word of the alleged bald eagles made its way to Biden, and with a look of optimism, he turned his face to the sky. He grew emotional. He said that at the Lake House, Beau used to sit by the water and watch the bald eagles fly overhead. The night Beau died, in 2015, Biden said he watched an eagle take off from the lake, circle in the sky, and then fly away. He hadn’t seen another bald eagle since that night, he said, until now. Looking at the bird, he said, “Maybe that’s my Beau.”

Biden wrote a book about his grief, and about his son, called Promise Me, Dad. Therein, he tells a similar story, but with a different bird. That night, he wrote, “Jill spotted a white egret at the far edge of the water.” She told her husband that, as he lay dying, she whispered to Beau to go to the dock, “his happy place,” with his brother. “We watched the egret for twenty minutes, until it finally took flight,” Biden wrote. “The two of us sat in silence as the egret circled overhead repeatedly, slowly gaining altitude, until it finally headed away to the south, beneath the clouds, and gradually disappeared from sight. ‘It’s a sign from God,’ Jill said. ‘Beau being at the lake one last time, and heading for heaven.’ ”

*Typical of the coverage of the man back then was this piece by PBS, that doesn’t touch on his memory loss, and excuses his lies on, naturally, Trump.

Have Trump’s serial lies lowered the bar for Biden’s serial gaffes?

Joe Biden has long been adept at talking with a foot in his mouth, so perhaps it's no surprise that lately, on the stump, he has overdosed on whoppers.

….. But Biden’s piece de resistance (thus far) happened on Aug. 21, in a New Hampshire meeting hall, when he recalled how he had journeyed to Afghanistan and pinned a medal on a Navy captain who had rappelled down a ravine to fetch the body of comrade killed in combat. The Navy captain had risen back up the ravine, carrying the body on his back. The captain said he didn’t deserve the medal, telling Biden: “Do not pin it on me, sir!” Recalling this story, Biden told his New Hampshire audience: “This is the God’s honest truth. My word as a Biden.”

Well, some fact-checking reporters scrutinized “God’s honest truth,” and here’s what they found: “(A)lmost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened … In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”

Biden has long told variations of this story to a number of audiences. Sometimes it’s a Navy captain (according to military records, that character is fictitious), sometimes it’s an Army captain (according to military records, ditto), and sometimes the heroic action took place in Iraq, not Afghanistan. Sometimes the dead soldier was pulled from a ravine, sometimes from a Humvee.

(No, that wasn’t his uncle Ambrose, who was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea, and it wasn’t his son Beau, who turned down the medal after he’;d died in that burning Humvee in Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan — who can remember? — it was Uncle Frank, or it was in an early rendition, who died 1999 before his prevaricating nephew became vice president )

Hence the conundrum for Democrats: Has Trump — with his documented 12,000 lies — lowered the bar so that Biden’s falsehoods should be deemed no big deal? That Biden should get a pass because his fictional forays are far more benign? (Last week, Trump lied that China was begging to restart trade talks with Tariff Man, that China had reached out to him with “high-level calls.” Turns out, Trump made that up. There were no calls.) Biden himself has insisted that he should get a pass; last December he said: “I am a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth.”

But perhaps lowering the bar for Biden is not the answer. Perhaps Democrats should insist on a higher standard of veracity from their 2020 nominee. Rest assured that if Biden faces off with Trump, some members of the mainstream press, in the quest for “balance,” will fudge the contrast and find a false equivalence between Biden’s gaffes and Trump’s lies. I’m not arguing that Democrats should summarily reject Biden; but, with Biden as the nominee, his foot-in-mouth disease is a potential risk.

Unless it’s not. Some Democratic primary voters in South Carolina, interviewed recently, don’t care a whit. One woman said his flubs were fine because “his heart is in the right place and that’s what we need right now.” One guy, asked about Biden’s errors, said, “So what? I do too. He’s human. It makes him real.” Another woman said, “That’s what makes him likable.” Another guy said, “The gaffes don’t matter because we all mess up, we’re all human.”

The lesson, perhaps, is that the veracity factor is only one of many. If voters like a politician, they’ll give that person plenty of slack. Trump’s cultists prove the point in the extreme, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Voters elected Ronald Reagan twice despite his frequent flights of imagination. (Random example: Reagan said that, as a member of the U.S. Army film corps, that he personally shot footage of Nazi concentration camps as they were being liberated. In truth, he never left Hollywood.) Context is everything. If Biden can convince enough people that he’s a comfortable soft landing after four dire years of Trump turbulence, his blarney won’t be a deal-breaker.