Theories of Joe Biden

There are people in this line of work who can remember where they were when the second vote on the third continuing resolution of 2011 failed thanks to the switch-in time of Gern Blanston, who briefly represented northern South Carolina after the infamous MacGuffin Affair cost Fuzzy Dunlop his seat but before redistricting forced Blanston into a head-to-head matchup with Pierre Delecto.

That ain’t me. I know more than the average civilian, sure, but if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you for certain whether there was a Senate Republican leader between Trent Lott and Bill Frist or which of the Chicago Daleys was briefly Obama’s chief of staff.

Maybe I don’t find that level of trivia interesting or important. Maybe the accelerated churn of the news cycle has made it impossible to keep any kind of timeline at my fingertips. Or maybe I’m just a bad pundit. In any case whenever Rich Lowry asks an exit question on the Editors podcast about whether some moment will be “remembered as a turning point” or “forgotten in a month,” I have a default answer.

But there’s one big exception to this rule I’ve been thinking of recently, a relatively transient bit of effluvium, that really bothered me at the time and has stuck in my head in the years since. It’s the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in 2012.

At the time I remember writing that it was one of the more shameful displays of flimflammery and demagoguery from a national political figure that I had ever seen. And despite a kind of Cambrian explosion of such displays in the years since, I stand by it.

The very worst of Joe Biden was on exhibition. The used-car salesman with the Cheshire grin, kissing your baby while stealing its lollipop. It was like his claim to a black audience during that same election that Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — would “put y’all back in chains,” but stretched out over a couple of hours. The ever earnest and archly midwestern Ryan, who would rather have conducted the entire debate in Excel spreadsheet formulae, simply ran into a buzzsaw of bull crap. Biden dodged and danced, lied and exaggerated and smeared, and ran out the clock.

I’m not sure how many votes it moved, but to me it was the clearest distillation to that point of the kind of creature Joe Biden is. The only thing that puzzled me then was whether Biden’s rhetorical hyperinflation was tactical condescension to swing voters, whom he didn’t trust to “get it” without thermonuclear embellishment, or whether he was just a lying liar who lied because to lie is what comes naturally.

It’s relevant in light of Biden’s widely condemned recent speech on the seemingly doomed federal election-takeover bill. The one where he said that if you are in favor of forcing Democratic functionaries to hand out free pizza at least 26 feet away from a voting booth then you make Bull Connor look like multi-platinum recording artist Beyoncé Knowles.

That speech settled the question the Paul Ryan debate raised for me.

Many Biden allies, who it should be noted also found the speech excessive and in poor taste, are disposed to argue in favor of rhetorical hyperinflation, that the colorful slurs and slanders were merely misguided attempts of emphasis of what is otherwise an important bill with a noble end.

But if Biden really thought “voting rights” were that important — and here I should stop to say that failing to put scare quotes around that phrase in this context is, to borrow a Bidenesque adjective, literally a form of media bias. But if Biden really thought “voting rights” were that important, that the future of American democracy was on the line, his party would be trying to work with Republicans to reform the Electoral Count Act, which actually had a bearing on what happened in 2020 broadly and January 6 specifically, instead of being largely indifferent to GOP overtures on the subject.

But the bill isn’t important, and its failure isn’t a threat to democracy. Closer to the opposite is true. It’s just that Joe Biden is a liar. More to the point, he’s a liar whose Build Back Better agenda just got demoted to Build Back Later, and who quickly had to pivot back to “voting rights” because that was the next-most-recent democracy-in-the-balance progressive priority to have gone down in flames, in the form of H.R. 1, and was therefore the nearest distraction at hand.

There are other theories of Joe Biden, of course. That the speech was a form of “elder abuse,” in that it was put in front of him by the unhinged DSA-adjacent youngsters who really run the White House; or merely that Biden himself is too old and pudding-headed to be up to the hard work of lowering the temperature and finding common ground that he promised in his lofty inaugural. That the ridiculous name-calling is a kind of corner-cutting. But those theories amount to the same thing. A guy who is short on substance and whose comfort zone is smears.

It’s certainly too late for the old dog to learn new tricks, and we shouldn’t expect any soul-searching or recalibrating. Far likelier that we see more — and more, and more — of the same. The problem with taming monetary inflation, which Biden may yet learn, is that it tends to feed on itself in a vicious circle. The same is true of bull crap.