 15 October 19 Independence and the Lifeline of Public Funding
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15 October 19
FOCUS: Matt Taibbi | The Biden Paradox
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi writes: "On a blistering afternoon in the courtyard of the East Las Vegas Community Center, former Vice President Joe Biden steps to the lectern. With white hair and aviator glasses, he looks like he wandered off the set of an Invisible Man remake."
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi writes: "On a blistering afternoon in the courtyard of the East Las Vegas Community Center, former Vice President Joe Biden steps to the lectern. With white hair and aviator glasses, he looks like he wandered off the set of an Invisible Man remake."
EXCERPTS:
People keep telling Biden he should just go away, but he takes the abuse and keeps soldiering on, like a stray dog following a hiking party. It’s working, or it was, anyway, until he recently began sinking in the polls.
Biden is a man from another time, marooned in a public sphere that has passed him by. His speeches about tax credits, “investing in ourselves,” and building “cutting-edge infrastructure” feel like echoes of “pro-growth” Democrat speeches from the Nineties, just returned to Earth after a journey around the sun. Along with a history of questionable ties to campaign donors, he’s also an old white man with a history of wandering hands and problematic utterances, which would seem to disqualify him these days for a post as an adjunct lit professor, let alone the liberal party’s nominee.
Everything seems like it should be against Joe Biden: #MeToo, age, a radicalizing Democratic base, calculated attacks from a huge field of primary opponents, an iffy past on racial issues, a Google-searchable mother lode of verbal boners, and a dozen other things.
But no one who is familiar with Biden’s past would ever write him off. He lost his grown son Beau to brain cancer in 2015, and his first wife, Neilia, and daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972. Unspeakable loss has become intertwined with his political persona, so much so that current Delaware Sen. Chris Coons once called grief Biden’s “superpower,” in the sense that it aids his ability to connect with voters. Bill Clinton said he felt your pain — with Biden it’s the opposite, voters feel his.
The Biden paradox: One could make an argument he’s building a legacy as the most comically maladroit national political contender in American history. At times, Biden 2020 has been more like an MTV blooper show than a presidential campaign. Here’s a rundown of what should have been a sleepy August campaign:
August 1st: “Poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids.” August 4th: Expresses sorrow over “tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan,” i.e., mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. August 8th: “We choose truth over facts!” August 16th: Confuses Burlington, Vermont, and Burlington, Iowa. August 21st: “Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the Seventies.” August 24th: In Keene, New Hampshire — “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont?” August 26th: Forgets which Dartmouth College building he just visited, telling the crowd, “I’m not going nuts.”
From there, Biden drove into telephone pole after telephone pole. He told a story about braving “Godforsaken” country in Afghanistan to pin a medal on a soldier’s chest that turned out to be an amalgam of multiple tales. He called Bernie Sanders the president (he’d already called Cory Booker the president). Then, in front of 14 million TV viewers for the third Democratic Party debate, he turned a question about the legacy of slavery into a rambling diatribe about how inner-city parents should leave a “record player” on at night, a line that was somehow both parody of right-wing paternalism and outdated by about 30 years.
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