This Is Who Joe Biden Has Always Been

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

There have been many highly irritating features of Joe Biden’s hapless presidency, but chief among them, undoubtedly, has been his apologists’ deep-seated need to turn the man into something that he is manifestly not.

 

The nature of partisan politics guarantees that flawed political candidates will be transmuted by their champions into saintly men of destiny. But the arrival of Donald Trump has pushed that tendency beyond its limits. Just as Trump’s many serious flaws have been exaggerated into cliché — Trump is not Hitler, and does not come close to being so — so his opponents’ virtues have been extrapolated into heaven. To the honest eye, Joe Biden was a midwit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth’s Last Honest Man. After he won the White House, this second characterization was foisted upon us with abandon.

 

It was never true. Worse still, it was the opposite of true. Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he would be pardoning his wayward son, Hunter, for both the federal crimes of which he had been convicted, and the many other crimes whose prosecution remained pending. In much of the commentariat, this development elicited surprise — not least because, on a whole host of occasions, President Biden and his team had stated flatly that no pardon would be forthcoming. Some of this surprise was performative. But much of it was not. Once again, the press and its brothers in the Democratic Party had been undone by their own credulity. If one repeats a lie often enough, the old saw goes, one eventually comes to believe it. And Joe Biden is an honorable man.

 

He’s not, of course. He never has been. He’s a liar, a blowhard, a partisan, an asshole. He’s not decent. He’s not straight-talking. His election did not represent a return to normalcy — or anything like it. That the ultimate defense of Biden has always been “but Trump” is — or, at least, ought to have been — rather telling. Donald Trump is a bad man; that Biden’s Praetorian guard has been obliged to triangulate around him is devastating. Nobody praises George Washington by comparing him to someone else. One does not establish Mother Teresa’s piety with sordid references to others. Their merits are merely announced — as one might announce one’s arrival at a fixed point in space. Joe Biden’s merits cannot be treated like this, because Joe Biden’s merits do not exist. They are projected, contrived, fantastical. When one examines the proposition even briefly, one sees that Biden is to Rectitude as Kamala Harris was to Joy.

 

At its highpoint, the Biden Delusion brought with it some truly preposterous claims, which culminated in the insistence by a collection of self-serious historians that Joe Biden had been the 14th-best president in the history of the United States — ahead of Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant, no less. In a series of encomia over the summer, Biden was relentlessly described as “consequential,” as a paragon of “uncommon decency,” and even as “the man America needed.” His flaws were explained away as myths. His imperfections were attributed to a childhood stutter. His corruption and indulgence were recast as a father’s love for his son. When he lied — and boy did he lie — his words were simply ignored. The logic undergirding this process was circular but seductive: Biden had to be good, because he had to win, and he had to win because the other guy was bad, so, clearly, he couldn’t be bad himself, because if he were bad then he might not win, and he had to win because the other guy was bad. Capiche?

 

It didn’t work. Now, as before, Americans do not much like Joe Biden, because they can see that there isn’t much to like. Now, as before, Americans do not much admire Joe Biden, because they can detect that Joe Biden isn’t admirable. Now, as before, Americans have resisted the urge to collapse ecstatically into paeans about his integrity, because they can sense that this claim is a façade. Yesterday, Biden rewarded their skepticism. Having lied incessantly about his desire to pardon his son, Biden not only issued the pardon anyway, he had the gall to adorn his decision with the assertion, “For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: Just tell the American people the truth.” Evidently, he hasn’t kept up with the times. Nobody believes any of that these days.