Sure, his Republican critics may be hypocrites — but so is he, and he’s given them a lot of ammo to work with.
Sure, his Republican critics may be hypocrites — but so is he, and he’s given them a lot of ammo to work with.
F or once, the media’s reflexive characterization of Republican politicians as thrusting, jumping, seizing pouncers has hit the nail squarely on the head. Reporting on the latest tranche of classified documents discovered in President Biden’s possession, CNN noted today that, since the story first broke, “top Republicans” have “sought to deepen Biden’s discomfort by leveraging the opportunity he offered to his political foes.” And so, indeed, they have. Are they hypocrites for doing so? No doubt. Did Biden hand them a big mallet with which they might repeatedly hit him, just as things seemed to be looking up? Yes, he did. And down the blows have come.
Who among us can say that he is surprised? Since Biden became the Democrats’ nominee in 2019, many in the press have felt the need to pretend that he is a competent, moderate, lovable, grandfatherly figure, whose steady hand on the tiller has reminded a starving nation what good, old-fashioned proficiency looks like. But Biden is no such thing, and he never has been. He’s a dime-a-dozen partisan blowhard, with an impression of his own abilities that has always been at odds with reality. Can Biden really have acquiesced to the searching of a former president’s home without checking first to ensure that he was not guilty of precisely the same crime that search aimed to find evidence of? Of course he can. What in the man’s entire political history would have suggested that he’d proceed otherwise? He’s a bungler, a braggart, a malarkey salesman whose sole redeeming quality is his longevity. Some people have talent; Biden has seniority. And seniority is no guarantee of results.
Yes, yes, yes — I’ve heard all the apologias. I agree that it is helpful for Biden that Donald Trump did the same thing he’s done. I agree that Trump has been unwaveringly impenitent, while Biden has pretended to be surprised. I agree that Trump’s infraction was materially worse, and that, if Hillary Clinton had been prosecuted for her own classified-information mishandling, the case for indicting him would be strong. But, all of that to one side, this is quite clearly not where Biden wanted to be. “He did it, too” is the sort of plea that one offers up from a position of weakness, not strength. What Biden wanted was the moral high ground: “I am good,” he hoped to propose, “and the guys on the other side are bad.” Now? Now, he’s merely less bad than his opponents. Now, he’s parsing culpability. Now, it’s “he took them on purpose” while “I put them in my garage at home because I have limited control of my effects.” There’s a gap there, sure. But it’s a lot narrower than the one Biden wanted to run on in 2024.
Which goes some way to explaining why he has begun to sound so peculiarly schizophrenic. Per his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden takes the security of classified documents “very seriously.” And yet, at the same time, he has “no regrets” about having hoarded them in various places, at various times, and having done since he was a member of the U.S. Senate. In September, the mere thought of classified documents’ being stored in a private residence led Biden to sputter in anguish during a 60 Minutes interview:
Scott Pelley: When you saw the photograph of the top-secret documents laid out on the floor at Mar-a-Lago, what did you think to yourself? Looking at that image.
President Joe Biden: How that could possibly happen. How one — anyone could be that irresponsible. And I thought, “What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” By that I mean names of people who helped or the — et cetera. And it’s just — totally irresponsible.
Now that the residence in question is his and the “anyone” is him, however, Biden finds the topic boring. “There’s no there there,” he insisted last week, before suggesting that journalists should cover something that matters. What does the president think of this issue? That all depends on the context.
Really, one struggles to imagine how Biden could have made it any worse for himself if he’d tried. The length of the gap between the initial discovery of the documents and the announcement of that discovery to the press suggests that the president and his team were keen to control the news cycle as tightly as possible for as long as possible. But the drip-drip-drip pace of the revelations, the many loose ends that have been allowed to fester, and the slow transition from Biden’s initial insistence that he had “self-reported” his violations to the embarrassing appointment of a special counsel to the eventual involvement of the FBI have all had precisely the opposite effect. The only headline worse than “Classified Documents Found at President’s Private Residence” is “More Classified Documents Found at President’s Private Residence,” because the use of “more” in any story gives the narrative an inexorable motion, making it impossible to set in the past. And President Biden has now provoked the latter headline three times — and counting.