By Jeffrey Blehar
Friday, July 12, 2024
Don’t you love it when you’re at a party having a
conversation, and someone on the margins of the group suddenly blurts out a
nervous answer to a question nobody else had asked or even been thinking about?
Everyone falls awkwardly silent for a moment, wondering what inner anxiety must
have prompted that, before agreeing for the sake of social niceties to
move on and pretend it didn’t happen. We’ve all been there, friends, so with
that thought in hand, allow White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates,
reviewing Biden’s NATO press conference last night in real time on Twitter, to
answer a question definitively not on anyone’s mind:
Oh dear. He is not in fact that, but I hope the money is
at least. If you can envision the massed entirety of global political media —
tens of thousands of separate, atomized individuals, across the full spectrum
of politics — offering one giant simultaneous reflexive side-eye, then imagine
it here. A lot of elected Democrats would have been content to pass over Joe
Biden’s barely defensible presser last night in quiet despair, or indulge a
sudden desire to leak to Alex Thompson of Axios. But some verbal
utterances are so embarrassing that you just feel the cold chill of desperate
overeagerness wash over you, and you begin to carefully sidle away from the
weirdo who said it. (To quote Josh
Barro: “The question on my mind is what’s wrong with these people.”)
But yes, according to Joe Biden’s rapidly shrinking
circle of professional defenders, last night’s rickety press conference
apparently put all doubts to rest once and for all. Now we can — nay, we must,
as patriotic duty — embark upon the long-delayed “Summer of Joe.” This guy is
on the comeback trail, and doubters had best keep quiet unless they want this
crafty, assured political operator to come back around for revenge after a
triumphant November win. Why, look at how he runs rings around even the
savviest diplomatic hands in his mastery of geopolitics! Henry Kissinger was a
hack fraud next to this guy.
It’s a nice bit of bluster. And a necessary one, for
absolutely nobody thinks that Biden did well last night. Not a single person.
What everyone thinks is that Biden did well enough to defend his corner
for a few days longer — until the next test, and perhaps until it’s too late to
do anything about it. Phil Klein put it well last night: By not being an
obvious catastrophe in the moment, this was in fact the worst political catastrophe of all for Democrats. They
would have been better served if Biden had just spontaneously mutated into a
pile of babbling goo right there like Seth Brundle molting his flesh and
completing his transformation into The
Fly. Instead, they now get to ride this out for at least a week longer.
Meanwhile, our allies around the world are doing their
level best not to turn green in public from embarrassment. Newly elected U.K.
prime minister Keir Starmer had to officially vouch this week that Joe Biden was “not
senile,” and “absolutely across the detail” when it came to complex
geopolitical matters. (Here’s a picture from their meeting — click that, and you
be the judge.) The foreign press was less persuaded, particularly at seeing
Biden introduce Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky earlier in
the day, with a confident “ladies and gentlemen,” as “President Putin.” (The
video is agonizing. He says it, turns to walk away from the microphone as the
audience awkwardly claps, and then corrects himself: “Whrzza? Wuh! Wer’re gonna
beat Prezzulent Putin! President Zelensky! I’m so focused on beatin’
Putin. We gotta worry about it.”) The press conference — which began only after
a significant delay, during which one can only imagine the intervention — was a
touch better. But it’s enough for Biden’s praetorian guard to use as an excuse
to cling to power, so the drama continues.
One of the dangers of viewing this spectacular crisis
from a comedic lens — as I am wont to do — or even a parochial political one,
is that you divert your focus away from the greater implications for the world
at large. And let’s not be too hard on ourselves here, either: The sanest way
to survive reckoning with this mess is to think of the last four years as
Armando Iannucci taking over as screenwriter
and showrunner
for all of U.S. politics. (The man knows how to craft a punch line.) But make
no mistake: We are also living through a world-historical crisis as
well. The foreign press’s coverage of Biden’s NATO press conference tells you
everything. The Times of London (perhaps the single most representative
embodiment of U.K. establishment sensibility) covered
it with the same level of sober concern they bring to military developments
in Kashmir, and for the same reasons: Biden’s instability affects us all.
Some in the media — especially those with absolutely boundless
incapacity for shame — are taking up guns for Team Biden, willing those
grey skies to clear up and putting on a happy face. Paul Krugman says he’s done
publicly calling for Biden to drop out, admitting that while he
hasn’t changed his mind, truth concerns him less than the idea of hurting the
Democratic brand in November if
he keeps telling it. (This is meant to inspire trust in the integrity of
both the Democratic Party and Paul Krugman, but plays a bit different to me.)
Jen Rubin of the Washington Post described
Biden’s press conference with palpable relief as his “best outing since the
debate,” which is a bit like saying that the Wilderness Campaign was Robert E.
Lee’s “best outing since Pickett’s Charge”: a losing battle fought in service
of an unworthy cause whose chances of victory had already long since been
frittered away in an act of epically confused vanity.
And just like Lee, these tattered “Rubin brigades” still fighting for him offer Biden little to no real prospect of victory, merely the prospect of clinging to a bloody, undignified war of attrition. On an album fittingly titled Combat Rock, Mick Jones once posed a grand imponderable: “Should I stay or should I go?” Joe Biden, now verbally descended to a level of intelligibility to rival any member of The Clash, has merely changed the “should” to “will.” We all know he must leave. The only question is whether he will leave with any chance of offering the American people a replacement, or drag this out until the bloody end and die like Custer at his own political Little Big Horn. It’s easy enough to enjoy America’s most captivating psychodrama as it dominates domestic politics; far less so when you realize that the cost of it is that the United States now stands, in the palsied body of Joe Biden, paralyzed by terminal infirmity and political chaos as a global audience watches on a world stage. Lives continue to hang in the balance.
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