Another day, another gaffe from the 46th POTUS. This time he has attempted to summon the dead.
“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Biden called to the audience from the lectern, summoning Republican congresswoman Jackie Walorski.
“I think she was going to be here,” Biden said.
Well, no as Jackie was late. Not tardy late but late in the ultimate sense of the word. The Republican congresswoman had died in a car accident little more than a month earlier.
Perhaps the President is shielded from awful news to keep his dander up. Maybe White House staff decline to burden Joe Biden with too much detail. Sadly, that’s a big no, too. On August 3, Biden issued a statement of lament which began, “Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana along with two members of her staff in a car accident today in Indiana.”
Biden is the oldest POTUS ever elected in the US, and a senator who had represented Delaware for 36 years. The street corner neurological diagnoses of presidential cognitive decline have become impossible to ignore. But it’s not just Biden. His presidency has become a symbol of America’s shift into gerontocracy.
The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is running again in the midterms and assured of re-election. She’s 82. She has represented California’s 12th Congressional District since 1987. Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer who is also up for re-election in his home state of New York, will turn 72 two weeks after the midterms.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is in his seventh term of office. He turned 80 last February. Just last month, McConnell predicted the GOP may not retake the majority in the Senate due to “candidate quality” for the 35 senate seats up for grabs in the midterms or presumably the lack of it.
It was a barbed reference to some GOP senate candidates who won their primaries with the anointment of Donald Trump but are looking shaky in polling but he might just as well have been saying the US Senate is most definitely a place for old men and one or two old women.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the old Soviet leadership where a sprightly Konstantin Chernenko took over the reins in the politburo at 73. Looking vastly older than his years, he shuffled off this mortal coil in office a year later, ending what is commonly known as the Era of Stagnation that had begun with Leonid Brezhnev who ruled the former Soviet Union by sheer force of his monobrow for 18 years.
The Age of Stagnation brings to mind what in my mind is the greatest cartoon ever drawn. Inked by the wonderful Mexican toonist, Antonio Rodriguez, it featured two Soviet men dressing in peasant shawls, long woollen skirts, socks and sandals with one saying to the other, “I tell you, Boris, Soviet Union is worst place in world to be transvestite.”
Brezhnev and his monobrow, and the more elegantly groomed Yuri Andropov were not just old men, they were surrounded by old men – Andrei Gromyko, Dmitry Ustinov, Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexei Kosygin.
Still, Lenin was just 47 when the Russian Revolution began, and Stalin was a mere stripling at 44 when he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party so maybe there’s not a lot to be said for fresh faces and fresh thinking.
Age, we are told by supreme optimists and those who attempt to defy the ravages of it, is but a number. The trouble for Biden is that the number of misspeaks, gaffes, bloopers, boners and blunders is increasing. Staffers should possibly consider scrawling the political cover-all for foot-in-mouth moments – “I misheard the question, misunderstood its meaning and then misspoke” on the back of his hand.
To be fair it gets no better on the lower wrung of the age and status ladder with Vice President Kamala Harris who can barely take a step without plunging a sensible shoe between her mandibles. Just yesterday she confused South and North Korea, heaping praise on North Korea as a stalwart ally of the US. In front of an audience of South Koreans.
To chronicle the verbal bumbles, miscues and misfires of President Biden is an onerous task. There is only so much time in the day after all.
Some recent notables include addressing a Holocaust memorial where the POTUS drew gasps while urging the audience to “honour the Holocaust.”
He meant horror and eventually corrected himself.
Or speaking on gun control in the wake of another school massacre, Biden ran through a recent list of school mass shootings which included, “Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida — 1918, 17 dead, 17 injured.” The shooting event had occurred a hundred years later, of course but what’s a century here or there for old Joe?
“I’m also sending to Congress a comprehensive package of — that will enhance our underlying effort to accommodate the Russian oligarchs and make sure we take their — take their, their ill-begotten gains,” Biden began.
Well, maybe the oligarchs do need accommodating as most of their luxury boats have been seized.
But for a bit of local flavour, who could forget the historic announcement of Australia’s transition to nuclear powered submarines when Biden happily could remember the name of the then UK PM, Boris Johnson on one screen in the Zoom call but not the other, our very own then PM, Scott Morrison? Well, Joe Biden obviously.
“Thank you, Boris. And I want to thank, er … that fella Down Under,” “Thank you very much, pal. Appreciate it, Mr Prime Minister.”
The more dangerous side of Biden is his freakish ability to venture off message into topics that can cause fingers to hover over buttons that feature skull and cross bone warnings.
Biden has now twice called for regime change in Russia which is not US policy, nor that of NATO. After every bumble, earnest White House staff and often State Department officials are running around behind him with a mop and bucket to tidy up the President’s verbal diarrhoea.
Yet it remains an open question as to whether Biden will run again in 2024. He says he will. He might forget to nominate but if he does, he may come up against a then 78-year-old Donald Trump.
Good luck, America.
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