They say old men forget.
The trouble with Joe Biden, and with Donald Trump, is they are two old men who never forget anything. They never learn anything either. And much that they remember is distorted. But they love nothing better than to talk of themselves and their respective glorious pasts.
Joe Biden’s speech to the Democratic National Convention was a rolled gold reason why the Democrats were right to get rid of him off the top of their ticket.
It was also the most Trump-like of all his speeches, in that it went on forever, it was longer than pain, Fidel Castro-like in the endurance test it set its listeners.
No cliche was left unmolested and it was all about Joe.
“Only in America could a boy with a stutter and of modest means end up sitting behind the Resolute Desk,” he remarked in one of the paeans of praise to himself.
Only in America? John Major ran away to the circus. Anthony Albanese grew up in a housing commission unit with his unmarried and disabled mum. Paul Keating went to work full time before he finished high school. Margaret Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter.
In any event, Biden had a perfectly comfortable middle class upbringing. But it is one of the standard tropes of almost all American politics that you have to claim a log-cabin origin story, that you were under-privileged and subjected to disadvantage, prejudice etc.
Barack Obama was raised by his bank manager grandmother and hard-working granddad, went to Hawaii’s best private school and then Harvard and still managed a remarkably self-pitying, and immensely successful, memoir.
Of course, nobody does schmaltz as schmaltzily as Joe Biden does.
We heard once more about how once he was told he was too young to be a senator, then that he was too old to be president.
The crowd roared: “Thank you, Joe”, the unspoken second half of which thought was: “it’s time to go!”
Remarkably, Biden did speak in a strong voice and mostly read all the words on the teleprompter, with relative fluency.
Whatever the stage of his cognitive challenges, he seems to speak better when he shouts. And everyone shouts in these convention speeches.
He did have the odd nice thing to say about Kamala Harris “the best decision I ever made”. And he claimed, wholly untruthfully, not to be angry at all those Democrats who told him to step down.
According to Biden, and these passages were very Trumpy, his one term in office was the greatest period of advancement in US history. The economy is the world’s best. America leads the world. Europe loves America. NATO loves America. All Americans are better off, thanks to him. And, key Democrat policy commitment of all, he would champion abortion, everywhere and in every circumstance, as, of course, will Kamala.
Naturally, Biden didn’t solve the seeming contradiction between such magnificent, historical success and the fact he was heading for a landslide defeat against Trump.
It was nonetheless a unified party convention that showcased a lot of enthusiasm. But Hillary Clinton and all the other liberal feminists celebrating the identity politics moment represented by Harris’s candidacy? I’m not sure. It has a touch of 2016 about it.
And, of course, no one could mention any of the policies of Bill Clinton’s presidency – welfare reform, balanced budget, anti-crime bill.
The party’s gone a long, long way left since then.
Joe didn’t lead it. He rode it. Now he’s made a relatively elegant dismount and can disappear into the sunset.
So long, Joe.
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