Miranda Devine: Joe Biden’s on the blink
What is wrong with the former vice president? He can barely make it through a scripted interview without stumbling, and his real running mate is his teleprompter, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The open secret of the 2020 US presidential campaign is Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment. But with seven weeks until the election, and the pandemic receding, the real question is how much longer the media will allow his handlers to keep him hidden from scrutiny?
Biden’s campaign carefully controls his occasional outings, pretends he is capable of conversing without a teleprompter, and keeps him masked and away from voters on the pretext that he is modelling responsible social distancing norms.
But there’s only so much of this charade voters will tolerate.
Even with a teleprompter, Biden keeps flubbing pre-prepared scripts, last week accidentally reading out “end of quote” in the middle of a spiel about social security.
MORE MIRANDA DEVINE
Why was Sydney mosque granted special COVID exemption?
Hidin’ Biden’s silence on riots won’t be forgotten
Zombie Safe Schools back from the dead
In another Ron Burgundy moment the next day, he read aloud the title of his script: “Look, Venezuela top line message is.”
He squints to read his lines, and frequently loses track and blathers, especially when numbers are involved.
“If you change the tax rate it went from 38 per cent to 21. If you just send it back to 20, 38 per cent, if you, 36 per cent to 28, that’s what we started trying to do.”
Sometimes he breaks off mid-sentence to instruct someone off camera to “bring it closer”, “put that back on”, “keep it down,” or “go back to the top”.
During a virtual Zoom session with union members last week, a young barista asked him an easy pre-vetted question, and there was an agonising seven-second delay while Biden waited for his answer to appear on the teleprompter.
“Move it up here,” he said crankily to someone off camera before reading out a boilerplate response that anyone else could have made up on the fly.
Biden’s reliance on pre-prepared notes is so obvious it has become a standard riff in Donald Trump’s rallies.
“They ask questions, and he starts reading the teleprompter,” the President said last week. “He says, ‘move the teleprompter a little bit closer, please.’ I don’t know, I think if I did that [it] would be the story of the year.”
Yet campaign spokespeople keep pretending Biden’s wooden performances are spontaneous and off the cuff. Biden press secretary TJ Ducklo blew off Trump’s teleprompter allegations as “laughable, ludicrous, and a lie”.
Last week he refused to answer the obvious question Fox News host Brett Baier tried to ask multiple times: Has Biden ever used a teleprompter during a TV interview?
Then a video surfaced on the weekend showing a clear image of a teleprompter screen with large green text reflected in the glass of a framed photograph Biden was holding up to the camera.
If he can’t get through a friendly interview without a teleprompter, how on earth does he expect to lead the free world?
It’s a question increasingly on voters’ minds. A Rasmussen poll in June found that almost 40 per cent of American voters believe Biden has “some form of dementia”, including one in five Democrats.
By last month 60 per cent of voters considered it unlikely he will even make it through a four-year term in the White House.
He no longer can rely on antipathy to Trump to carry him over the line, and it’s too late for anyone to replace him before the polls.
With President Trump energetically campaigning around the nation, and the polls tightening, crunch time is looming for Biden to prove he is not senile.
He has started at least to give the impression that he is out and about on the campaign trail.
But when he does emerge from his basement, it has usually been just to drive down the road in Delaware, to read a 10-minute teleprompter speech, and go home. Then he takes the next day off.
Two weeks ago, in only his second plane trip since March, he flew to a former steelworks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to deliver a speech blaming the President for “stroking” the riots in Democratic cities.
A Reuters photo, shot from above, revealed a bizarre scene, Biden isolated in the cavernous space with social-distancing circles laid out on the floor so six masked reporters and one videographer could stay five to six metres away. He didn’t take a single question.
Trump, by contrast, does almost daily press conferences, and regular lengthy interviews, many with tough questions.
His schedule is hectic as he crisscrosses the country, doing presidential business and holding outdoor airport rallies attended by thousands of enthusiastic people.
In the past two weeks he has been to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Reno and Las Vegas in Nevada. Yesterday he hit California and Arizona.
Later this week he will be back in Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Carolina. During the same period, Biden at least has left Delaware, but he has visited only four states this month, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York, for a non-speaking part in 9/11 commemorations.
Yesterday, he and his teleprompter drove down the road from his basement to stand outdoors, swatting bugs and reading a bizarre speech slamming Trump as a “climate arsonist”.
“You know what is actually threatening our suburbs? Wildfires … floods … hurricanes … We have four more years of Trump’s climate denials. How many suburbs will be burned in wildfire, how many suburban neighbourhoods will be flooded, how many suburbs will be blown away?” Someone actually wrote that for him.
All those months of social isolation in his basement seem to have done him more harm than good.
Unlike Trump, Biden is not match fit. He seems cranky and exhausted. Swirling scandals are waiting to trip him up, whether sexual assault allegations from a former staffer, or revelations about millions of dollars his family has reaped in dodgy deals in China.
The real test will come later this month when he has to face Trump in the first of three scheduled presidential debates.
Trump and his friend, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is negotiating debate conditions on his behalf, claim Biden will be drugged up with attention deficit medication to help him concentrate. Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged Biden not to do the debates at all.
Expectations are so low, he will be hailed a maestro if he manages to remain upright.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph