By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Almost a decade ago, Clint Eastwood got up on stage
at the Republican National Convention and spoke to an empty chair. Eastwood explained to the audience that the president
was sitting in the empty chair. And then he addressed himself to the empty
chair. It was weird. “So, so, Mr. President, how do you, how do you handle, how
do you handle promises that you’ve made when you were running for election,” he
said, and added, “and how do you handle, how do you handle it?”
I found the whole thing baffling. But some people, I’m
told, really liked the speech. They “got it,” they reported. It had something
to do with how Obama was hardly there at all. Eastwood remonstrated
with the empty chair. “You’re getting as bad as Biden,” Eastwood said, then
turned to the audience: “We all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic
Party. Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.”
Well, ouch. There he had a point.
I’ve been thinking about that idea of an empty chair a
lot lately. When a pope dies in the Catholic Church, we say that the chair of
Peter is vacant: sede vacante. There is even a group of cranks
referred to as “sedevacantists.” They are a set of traditionalists who believe
that there is no valid pope, and maybe there hasn’t been one since 1962. But
now popes don’t die; they retire. We have more popes than chairs for them now.
In the White House, we have the opposite problem: a chair
of incredible authority, but functional nobodies falling into it. Biden’s last
week was atrocious. He spoke to American troops in Poland and suggested that
soon they would see, with their own eyes, women and children standing in front
of tanks and holding their ground. Thus he suggested that America would deploy
to Ukraine directly. The White House walked it back.
Asked if United States policy toward Russia could change
if Russia deployed chemical weapons, the grin with a body behind it said that
we would respond “in kind” — rather directly suggesting that we were readying
our own stockpiles of chemical weapons. National-security adviser Jake
Sullivan, presumably embarrassed to do so, immediately clarified that in fact
we have no intention of using chemical weapons.
Then, coming to the end of a speech in Poland that was
clearly written to de-escalate the situation by distinguishing our unshakeable
commitment to NATO and very limited commitments to Ukraine, Biden just
ad-libbed in a spirit contrary to the entire speech: “For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power.”
The White House began clearing that up. But the pain goes
on and on. The president meant that Putin couldn’t remain in power in Ukraine;
he certainly wasn’t announcing a change of policy.
This cleanup job was for naught, as Biden was again
confronted by reporters and asked about his “Fer-God’s-sakes” comment. He said:
“I’m not walking anything back.” Then, he explained: “I just was expressing my
outrage.”
But it’s not the job of the president to just express his
feelings in major speeches on foreign soil during one of the most delicate
foreign-policy crises in decades.
At this point, Putin’s infamous troll farms and
propaganda mills would not even have to bother creating “deep fakes” of the
president of the United States threatening Russia. It’s all there on film —
telling American troops they’ll be in Ukraine soon and reporters that the U.S.
is ready to use chemical weapons. Worst of all, the expressive outburst that
seemed to confirm years of Putin’s own paranoid claims, that the U.S. was
aiming to regime-change him, too.
Kamala Harris, when faced with the task of explaining the
conflict and America’s role in it to the public, offered this:
So, Ukraine is a country in Europe.
It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country.
Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called
Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we
stand for.
A decade ago, Republicans showed they couldn’t quite pick
the right man for the job of convention speaker, just an old fella with a lot
of built-up cachet from decades past who mumbled whatever came to his mind.
They chose another version of that for their nominee years later. And now
Democrats have done the same. At this point, I’d take my chances with just an
empty chair.
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