On the hustings Sleepy Joe Biden lives up to the insult

‘No sense of occasion or timing’: Joe and Jill Biden take the stage in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

Because of the remarkable bungle in Democrat caucus results, Joe Biden did not yet not know late on Tuesday if he had got off to a good start in Iowa. But could it be that, regardless of the result, his campaign is fatally flawed by the simple truth that he is a lousy campaigner?

You have to be in the room with Biden during his stump speeches to truly understand what a low-energy, low-level performer he is. The contrast with a Biden rally and those of his Democrat ­rivals Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg — not to mention Donald Trump — is stark. In his final rally on the eve of the Iowa caucus, Biden all but sent the crowd to sleep with his monotone, rambling delivery.

He had no sense of occasion or timing — he spent the first half of his speech thanking people so that by the time he got around to speaking about why he should be president, the crowd was already distracted and restless.

The contrast between a Biden rally and a thunderous Trump rally is night and day. As Biden spoke, the atmosphere in the room of about 300 people was so flat that it became a talking point afterwards among the large group of US and international journalists covering it.

Biden performs better in one-on-one interviews but on the hustings he looks and sounds every bit of his 77 years. He speaks to the crowd as if he is having a Franklin D. Roosevelt-style fireside chat, a style which belongs to a different era and feels as old as Biden looks. His message, when he finally get around to telling it, is also surprisingly one-dimensional.

Biden campaigns almost solely on the notion that he is the anti-Trump. His message is tailored to attract those voters who detest Trump and simply want America to return to an imagined golden era of civility and unity. Biden talks of the need for character and civility and about Trump’s lack of either. He talks about the need for America to regain its leadership on the world stage, and of the need to tackle the racial and ideological divisions that he says Trump has widened during his presidency. These are all noble aims for those who dislike the President.

But after listening to Biden for a while, it starts to sound very one dimensional. Unlike Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg, Biden doesn’t seem to promise anything new or bold except to turn back the clock to 2016 or even earlier.

Biden is taking a big gamble to assume that the hatred towards this divisive president is so widespread that he will be swept into the White House simply on a tide of anti-Trump anger. Will that be enough?

The trouble is that many voters don’t want to vote against something, they want to vote for something, and Biden is not giving them much to vote for beyond a protest vote against Trump. If Biden has a message that extends beyond this you won’t hear it in his stump speech, not least because you may have already fallen asleep.