Frail or forceful, Biden keeps stumbling

Joe Biden speaks in Ballina last week. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland was personal, given his Irish roots, and presidents are allowed such trips. The excursion marked the 25th anniversary of the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement to end sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. This provided the excuse for the president to go sightseeing in his family homeland. But the visit also poignantly highlighted Biden’s chief political vulnerability if he runs for a second term.

It was a nostalgic four days. Think National Lampoon’s Vacation, only in a rainy, emerald-green setting with Biden playing a much older Chevy Chase, traipsing with sister and son through pubs and castles, viewing Newry Harbour, where his forebears left famine for America, meeting with cousins close and distant, even chancing across the priest who administered last rites to his son Beau.

He also offered one of the apparently infinite number of parental quotes Biden remembers. This time it came not from his dad but his mum, who he claimed “whenever we’d say something was unusual”, would reply “Joey, that’s the Irish of it”. Hmmm.

The visit was as long or longer than eight of Biden’s 12 international presidential trips so far. But instead of concerning real business, this one seemed to be mostly sightseeing and photo-ops. If there was any substantive purpose, it was likely bolstering Biden’s Irish-American credentials in battleground states. Notably, this trip lacked the customary news conference for an international presidential trip, in which the leader and that of his host country take questions from local and American reporters. I can’t remember – and neither can lots of journalists – the last presidential trip without such a televised press conference.

The likely reason for this omission points to Biden’s growing risk for 2024 – his frailty. It was on full display in the president’s confusing remarks during a meeting with families of the US embassy staff in Dublin. The video is painful, better to read the transcript. Biden answered one student’s question about the keys to success, “making sure that we don’t all have Covid”, before asking, “What are we talking about here?” His son Hunter, serving as advance man, helpfully repeated the question. His 80-year-old father responded, “I’m not sure I’m the best guy to explain it”.

The President then launched into a lengthy story about how it’s OK to question people’s judgment when you disagree with them, “but it’s never okay to question their motive.” His tale involving the late Republican senator Jesse Helms went long and limped to its conclusion, repeating his admonition not to question motives. Biden acknowledged he’d given “a long answer to a real quick question”, and after another back and forth, Hunter gently reminded him, “You’re supposed to do the rope line, dad”. This seemed to confuse the President still further.

White House aides almost surely decided not to risk a repeat performance in a formal setting or had previously planned to minimise appearances that would highlight Biden’s apparently diminishing capacity. But they can’t hide it forever.

In more-scripted settings, Biden can be forceful, his rhetoric stinging. But Biden does himself no good when his verbal attacks and stubborn actions are contrary to the civility he’s displayed elsewhere.

In contrast to his advice to the young man in Ireland, Biden has been attacking the GOP’s motives on the debt ceiling since January, saying the Republicans “seem determined to be the party of chaos and catastrophe”, and alluding to Republicans making “reckless threats to take the economy hostage”. As the deadline approaches, he and other Democrats have only escalated their attacks on the GOP and rejected negotiating a compromise. That’s potentially a very damaging mistake. Biden ran in 2020 on his image as a moderate, built in part on the sort of conciliatory and fiscally conscious attitude he sometimes displayed in past debt-ceiling fights.

After voting 10 times as a senator against raising the debt limit under GOP presidents, he’s now saying it’s “mind boggling” to risk defaulting on obligations by failing to increase the debt ceiling. In 2011, vice president Biden championed compromise and criticised any “my way or no way” approach. And he’s not the only Democrat suffering whiplash: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer also voted against raising the debt limit three times under George W. Bush and now demands a clean debt ceiling increase with no negotiations on spending cuts.

An odd admixture is playing out – frailty and civility on the one hand, hard edges and inflexibility on the other. It’s not the best of Biden in either case. It’ll cost him.

The Wall Street Journal

Karl Rove helped organise the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of The Triumph of William McKinley (Simon & Schuster, 2015).