Ponce de Biden

A couple of weeks ago I received a nasty email from a Democratic Party water boy, claiming I was a fascist for referring to the current Oval Office occupant as “President Sippy Cup” (a tame joke by most standards; I never write “Dementia Joe” or “Orange Turd” about Trump). Curious, I replied, asking who he was. Turns out the man, whose name I then recalled, was a frequent detractor of my MUGGER column in New York Press, around 25 years ago. He said that we parried in the Letters section of NYP, and that I was “disarmingly polite” in my rejoinders to his expletive-filled rants; he added that he “almost never reads Splice Today.” Demographics rule!

Last Thursday night I inadvertently tuned into Biden’s belated State of the Union campaign rally—I’m guessing the date was set for two days after Super Tuesday, just to make sure Trump was the “presumptive” GOP nominee,” for these annual rituals are always staged in January or February—and was semi-riveted for a half hour before switching to Matt Damon’s best film The Good Shepherd. I haven’t watched a SOTU since George Bush’s in January, 2002, and, despite the frightening tumult of the previous four months, it was a snoozer.

But I’m glad I watched at least part of Biden’s address: and I don’t agree with the Permanent Beltway chin-scratchers (they’re approaching the age of the presidential candidates, so perhaps that rarified-in-their-minds-only club will sooner rather than later disband) that the “feisty” Biden has contributed to today’s divisive political culture by turning the SOTU into a stump speech. So what? (And, in fairness, Democrats loved his angry, high-decibel remarks, Republicans hated it, so it fit into the “narrative.”)

I did get a laugh from New York Times wacko Paul Krugman’s claim the next day on Twitter: “A thought: the whole Biden-is-too-old thing was kind of a bubble, in the sense that people were buying it mainly because other people were buying it. Did Biden just burst that bubble?” Biden, at least on the record, relieved insiders, but not the “regular folks,” who feared he’s not mentally up to the job. I don’t agree on that point, but give enormous credit to Biden’s modern-day Dr. Robert who must’ve injected Sippy with a rip-roaring cocktail of drugs so he could stay awake; and I wonder if Trump also uses the same needle-wielding magician as Biden when he gives long speeches. It wouldn’t be a surprise: both political parties share a lot of the same donors (bet-hedging), consultants and pliable journalists, so why not the doc who’d be banned from Major League Baseball if his identity was revealed?

I don’t mind sounding cavalier about Biden’s live campaign rally, as noted previously politics for at least the past decade is an entertainment sport, and it’ll be a lot of fun in the next week or so when the polls (probably, hard to predict) show an uptick for Biden and his acolytes will gleefully soil their drawers—another old-fashioned term, just like “malarkey,” which Biden uses so frequently he’s ruined it for everyone else—in anticipation of staving off the end of democracy in the “American Experiment” for at least another four years.

I’m hardly alone in believing this election will swing back and forth between Biden and Trump, and if it’s close that’s an advantage to the incumbent for he has a better apparatus (and lawyers; I’ve never understood why Trump hires ambulance chasers instead of serious attorneys, but maybe no one wants to work for him, not only for his meddling but the fear their bill won’t be paid) for plucking votes out of this and that precinct in swing states. We do know that another part of today’s political maneuvering, not unprecedented, is both sides “harvest” votes in the JFK/Nixon/Trump/Biden tradition, although it’s more pronounced in these past two Covid-infected elections. I’m not a conspiracist, and believe Biden won in 2020, but you’d have to be ridiculously naïve to believe no funny business occurred with all those mail-in votes. On both sides: Biden’s team was just better than Trump’s.

Alleged conservative Ross Douthat, another anti-Trump Times columnist, was unusually clear and candid—he admits he’s part of the “elite establishment”—in trying to explain why, at least now, “blue-collar Hispanics” who voted for Biden in 2020 are now “leaning” toward Trump. “If you take that kind of constituency as a starting place, you may be able to reason your way to a clearer understanding of Biden’s troubles: by thinking about ways in which high borrowing costs for homes and cars seem especially punishing to voters trying to move up the economic ladder, for instance, or how the hold of cultural progressivism over Democratic politics might be pushing more culturally conservative minorities to the right even if wokeness has peaked in some elite settings.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a sucker for outdated political ceremonies, thought Biden’s speech was “pow pow pow.” She wrote: “People will say that guy has a lot of fight in him… There was a give-‘em-hell-Harry vibration, as if he’d been reading up on Truman.” Whether that puts Trump in Thomas Dewey’s shoes, I’m not sure, but do think once Peggy’s little-girl sugar hangover is over, she’ll concentrate on Biden’s SOTU promises and deceptions. An early inkling: “He vowed, with a new Congress, to ‘restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.’ I’m not sure how that works.”

It doesn’t work, unless a reelected Biden subverts democracy. Not that the “bubble” will complain.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023