The Empty Chair

A lmost a decade ago, Clint Eastwood got up on stage at the Republican National Convention and spoke to an empty chair. Eastwood explained to the audience that the president was sitting in the empty chair. And then he addressed himself to the empty chair. It was weird. “So, so, Mr. President, how do you, how do you handle, how do you handle promises that you’ve made when you were running for election,” he said, and added, “and how do you handle, how do you handle it?”

I found the whole thing baffling. But some people, I’m told, really liked the speech. They “got it,” they reported. It had something to do with how Obama was hardly there at all. Eastwood remonstrated with the empty chair. “You’re getting as bad as Biden,” Eastwood said, then turned to the audience: “We all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party. Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.”

Well, ouch. There he had a point.

I’ve been thinking about that idea of an empty chair a lot lately. When a pope dies in the Catholic Church, we say that the chair of Peter is vacant: sede vacante. There is even a group of cranks referred to as “sedevacantists.” They are a set of traditionalists who believe that there is no valid pope, and maybe there hasn’t been one since 1962. But now popes don’t die; they retire. We have more popes than chairs for them now.

In the White House, we have the opposite problem: a chair of incredible authority, but functional nobodies falling into it. Biden’s last week was atrocious. He spoke to American troops in Poland and suggested that soon they would see, with their own eyes, women and children standing in front of tanks and holding their ground. Thus he suggested that America would deploy to Ukraine directly. The White House walked it back.

Asked if United States policy toward Russia could change if Russia deployed chemical weapons, the grin with a body behind it said that we would respond “in kind” — rather directly suggesting that we were readying our own stockpiles of chemical weapons. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan, presumably embarrassed to do so, immediately clarified that in fact we have no intention of using chemical weapons.

Then, coming to the end of a speech in Poland that was clearly written to de-escalate the situation by distinguishing our unshakeable commitment to NATO and very limited commitments to Ukraine, Biden just ad-libbed in a spirit contrary to the entire speech: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House began clearing that up. But the pain goes on and on. The president meant that Putin couldn’t remain in power in Ukraine; he certainly wasn’t announcing a change of policy.

This cleanup job was for naught, as Biden was again confronted by reporters and asked about his “Fer-God’s-sakes” comment. He said: “I’m not walking anything back.” Then, he explained: “I just was expressing my outrage.”

But it’s not the job of the president to just express his feelings in major speeches on foreign soil during one of the most delicate foreign-policy crises in decades.

At this point, Putin’s infamous troll farms and propaganda mills would not even have to bother creating “deep fakes” of the president of the United States threatening Russia. It’s all there on film — telling American troops they’ll be in Ukraine soon and reporters that the U.S. is ready to use chemical weapons. Worst of all, the expressive outburst that seemed to confirm years of Putin’s own paranoid claims, that the U.S. was aiming to regime-change him, too.

Kamala Harris, when faced with the task of explaining the conflict and America’s role in it to the public, offered this:

So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.

A decade ago, Republicans showed they couldn’t quite pick the right man for the job of convention speaker, just an old fella with a lot of built-up cachet from decades past who mumbled whatever came to his mind. They chose another version of that for their nominee years later. And now Democrats have done the same. At this point, I’d take my chances with just an empty chair.