Joe the Chameleon

W hat kind of president might Joe Biden be should he be elected next Tuesday? No one can really say. Consider two widely circulated Biden videos.

Video one: (context here): Biden, campaigning in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and surrounded by activists, approaches a young progressive who says she worries that he won’t do enough to fight energy companies in the name of climate change. Biden takes her hand and says, “I want you to look in my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

Video two: Biden, campaigning for hard-hat votes in Pennsylvania, where fossil fuels harvested via fracking are the basis of an industry that enjoys widespread support, vows “a clean energy strategy that has a place for the energy workers right here in Western Pennsylvania,” adding, “I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again, I am not banning fracking, no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.”

So Biden won’t ban fracking, but he will end fossil fuel, which is what fracking is for. Maybe the frackers will be allowed to keep working if they promise to frack only for pixie dust.

Biden is the kind of guy who, when speaking to an audience he thinks contains racist whites, brags about receiving an award from George Wallace or reminisces about his friendships with segregationist Dixiecrat senators such as Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, and John Stennis. Among those who place a high value on fighting for civil rights, though, he concocts a completely false tale about getting arrested trying to visit the great South African Nelson Mandela.

Biden is the kind of guy who flatters the National Association of Police Officers by telling them, “You wrote the [1994 crime] bill.” When speaking to a racially mixed audience, he slips into what he considers black vernacular and claims of Mitt Romney, “He gonna put y’all back in chains.” Last May, when speaking to the radio host Charlamagne tha God, he awkwardly tried on the vernacular again while framing himself as an authority on blackness: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

From 1976 to 2019, Biden backed what he thought was a popular stance on abortion, championing abortion rights but also backing the Hyde amendment, which forbids federal funding of abortion. On May 8, 2019, the ACLU posted a video of one of its supporters introducing herself to Biden as a fan of the group and then asking him if he would abolish the Hyde amendment, “which hurts poor women and women of color.” He said, “Yes, and by the way, ACLU member, I got a near-perfect voting record my entire career.” On June 5, 2019, NBC News reported that the Biden campaign had just reaffirmed that the candidate still supported the Hyde amendment. Within a day, Biden’s fellow Democratic senators and presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren all denounced the Hyde amendment. The day after that, Biden ditched his position of 43 years and said he was against it.

Joe Biden: human chameleon. Long before the mock-documentary form he pioneered became a cliché, Woody Allen got the idea for Leonard Zelig, perhaps his most-cited character, by observing the way people behave at cocktail parties. Funny that people who feel social anxiety about acceptance among their peers tend to nod along and agree with whatever is being said. And when someone says the opposite, the Zeligs of the world just . . . continue nodding and say, “Well, that’s an excellent point, too.” Zeligs just want to be liked.

“Zelig was about how we all want to be accepted, to fit in, to not offend,” Allen wrote in his autobiography Apropos of Nothing. The filmmaker noted that the term “Zelig” has entered the vocabulary to mean someone who is surprisingly present at a wide variety of historical events. “But the primary meaning of ‘Zelig’ should be when one searches for a word to describe one who keeps abandoning his position and adopting the new popular one.”

Allen carried the observation to comic absurdity: The woebegone hero of Allen’s film became black when among black people, then Chinese among Chinese. But then Allen segued into political implications: A nation of Zeligs might follow passively along behind a Hitler or a Mussolini: Well, that’s an excellent point, too.

What if a leader turns out to be a Zelig, though? Check out that pro-anti-war speech Biden gave during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Biden voted for the war because he wanted to prevent the war, he later explained. Like most of the ambitious Democrats in the Senate, he figured the war would probably be as successful as Operation Desert Storm and that consequently anyone who voted it against it (as Joe Biden had done against the 1991 invasion) would look cowardly, foolish, and/or unpatriotic in the aftermath. On the other hand, maybe this war wouldn’t go so well. Who could say? Biden really, really wanted to fit in — with both sides. So he blasted the war:

Even though we are in no imminent danger, even though there is no violation of any international rule, we think the country of Xanadu are bad guys and we are invading. That would be a serious mistake. . . .  I don’t want Beijing waking up one morning and saying, ‘You know, we have a right to preemptively attack Taiwan.’

But, he argued, since Saddam Hussein had broken the terms of the cease-fire in 1991, attacking him “is not preempting, it is enforcing, it is finishing a war he reignited.” “Everything may go smoothly,” he noted. “And I think there is a possibility it could happen.” But on the other hand, things could also not go smoothly, so we should be honest about this: “Big nations cannot bluff. We should tell the American people straight up. . . .  This is the time for a little honesty in advertising.” He went on like this for thousands of words, explaining how the war was either a good idea or a bad idea before he voted for it. Joe Biden is the guy at the party who can’t disagree with anybody.

A senator can talk this way. But a president is a decision-maker. He can’t just muse that the decisions are difficult ones. If 50 years of behavior in Washington is any guide, Biden’s moves as president, should he be elected, will rest largely on what he thinks his audience wants to hear. But whom does he think of as his audience? The American people? The pundits on CNN? The international community represented by the U.N.? White House aides? Environmentalists in San Francisco? Hard hats in Western Pennsylvania? Racists? Civil-rights activists? Peaceniks? Warmongers? His cabinet? Kamala Harris? The editorial board of the New York Times? Perhaps he will be thinking of all of them. The presidency is a job that has proven tricky for the most decisive men to handle. Should he become president, Biden may prove the least decisive man ever to hold that office. Which means America may face a leadership vacuum as it waits for President Zelig to guess what people think he should do.