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| Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) |
With Bernie Sanders now out of the race, Joe Biden is the nominee presumptive of the Democratic Party. There's a lot that comes with this position, particularly in a year where we're all stuck in our houses, many of us are applying for unemployment or worried we'll need to in the near future, where we are wondering if our relatives (or ourselves) are about to come down with a deadly disease that has killed at least 33,000 Americans (and that number is likely far short of reality). And that's on top of the already long laundry list of worries Americans have that the next president will face-we haven't even begun to talk about climate change, ballooning student loan debt, America's persistent gun violence problem, and the likelihood that the next president will almost certainly replace either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court (likely both). But today, I'm going to talk about a conversation I've had (I counted) five times in the last week-questions about Joe Biden's fitness to lead because of his age and verbal tics.
I'm not calling out anyone here (I've had this conversation with a number of people who read this blog on the regular, so I want to say that to begin with) because based on the news this is a conversation that is not being properly addressed in the media, but I do want to share why I think this is a silly, and really dangerous, thing to joke about and to assume. For those who are not familiar with this because they avoid social media, there is a recurring question about Joe Biden's mental capacity to become president. This is driven by Biden's interview and speaking style. Biden oftentimes will indulge in "uh's," "um's" and occasionally will restart himself while talking, rethinking his speaking style mid-sentence. To some observers, this has been attributed not to a stuttering problem that he has had for years (he's been pretty up-front about this), but to senility. It seems pretty obvious, to me, though, as someone who has followed Joe Biden's career closely for 20 years, that this is not the case, and for many people, they're just listening to what Joe Biden had to say for the first time.
Look, for example, at this interview that Biden did for 60 Minutes in 2010, during his first term as Vice President. Biden frequently will employ "uh's," "um's, and will misspeak-it's clear on certain words, that they get stuck in his throat. While people oftentimes would talk about Biden's "gaffes" or "verbal missteps" (who could forget the infamous "this is a big f@*#ing deal" moment?), no one was questioning his cognitive ability at the time. You compare his 2010 interview with Harry Smith to one he did with Norah O'Donnell in October for the same program, and Biden does indulge in the same "uh's" and "um's,' but again-this doesn't look that different to me. He's still able to discuss with O'Donnell complicated issues about tax reform, for example, that most people wouldn't be able to do; President Trump certainly wouldn't be able to exchange with O'Donnell in this same fashion.
But it's noticeable to me that the clips that are shared are not interviews like the ones on 60 Minutes, where Smith & O'Donnell are focused on more issue-based questions, more focused on getting "the news." The clips that you most often see complaining about Biden are late night talk show interviews, ones he has done with Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert. Biden's interviews with these men have more pressure to be funny than his ones on 60 Minutes and it shows (you see his biggest delays in answering questions here when he's coming up with a one-liner, but all politicians do that-with the exception of someone like Al Franken or Kyrsten Sinema, politicians are not naturally funny people); this is not a place Biden is at-home. Because the vice president doesn't appear on late night talk shows with regularity, it's harder to find comparisons here, but you do see something similar in his interview with Ellen Degeneres while he was promoting the Affordable Care Act during his time in the Obama administration. Not being gifted as a speaker in late night interviews could certainly be considered a campaign liability, I'll give you that (many people get their political insights from figures like Colbert & Degeneres, possibly more than do from a show like 60 Minutes), but it's not a sign of dementia or Alzheimer's.
So where do these accusations come from? First, they come from people looking at Biden for the first time. I realized this when I was looking for clips of Biden on popular programs (not necessarily news programs, but entertainment ones and the only ones I readily found were the Ellen interview and a 2012 Top Ten list with David Letterman)-Biden has not spoken in front of the American people very often in a way they were paying attention to, and so for a lot of them, they aren't used to his cadence. Combined with his age, and people start to conflate the two, not realizing this has been an issue for Biden for years. Secondly, Biden, always quite youthful in appearance, has started to physically show his age. This isn't really a reason to preclude him from public office (Bernie Sanders, for example, physically looks his age and rarely gets comments for it, nor should he), but it's an easy physical comparison to make to Biden even ten years ago. I don't argue that Biden looks much older than he did ten years ago-that's not really up for debate. But again, politicians in high-ranking positions do age faster as a result of their stress. And Biden's physical results indicate that he doesn't have any health issues that would preclude him from serving as president, so the fact that he has a few more wrinkles shouldn't be cause for alarm.
The third reason is the reason I'm writing this article. Biden has relatively few scandals on him. There are some decades-old votes that he clearly has distanced himself from, and while I would argue that it's fair to hold him accountable to those votes (particularly his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings), I don't think you can compare that to modern-day Joe Biden, who has gone out-of-his-way to atone for those sins, or certainly not to Donald Trump, who is egregiously worse on every issue progressives or Democrats (or hell, moderates) care about. The reality is without a scandal, Trump has shown a propensity to invent scandals if need be to attack his opponents. So far, all he's been able to muster is attacks on Hunter Biden, which are going to go nowhere if he focuses on them too hard (putting aside the clear legal issues that Donald Trump's three eldest children and their spouses have gotten themselves into in the past decade, attacking Hunter Biden means you're attacking the only living son of a man who has had to bury two of his children-that's not going to fly with the American people...Hunter Biden isn't running for president & Joe Biden has been through more family tragedy than most people can fathom) and attacks on Biden's age. It should be laughable to anyone for Donald Trump to be complaining about other people's speaking styles when he basically is a "word soup" every time he opens his mouth, but that Democrats continually parrot the attacks that Trump has, without malice but as if they are fact, recalls some of the attacks Hillary Clinton endured in 2016. And lest we remember, the Republicans also attacked Hillary's health & made the mainstream media pursue it in interviews with Clinton-four years later, she's still kicking & regularly doing press tours). This is not a new playbook.
So before you decide to make the Biden joke, I want you to think about what you're doing. I think it's okay to be concerned that Biden has verbal gaffes, or to be concerned with his potential performance against Trump in a debate (Trump, if he does do the debates, will surely be trying to trigger Biden's stutter to underline his point). But to conflate those verbal gaffes with accusations of dementia without a bit of evidence (and if you look at old tapes, evidence to the contrary) feels wrong. You're essentially giving Trump exactly what he wants, exactly what he did with Hillary Clinton, by validating something that isn't true by questioning it as if it is. Questions on Biden's speaking ability are more attacks on his stutter than on his age or his intellect, and that should feel icky. It's okay to be nervous about Biden losing (we all should be concerned about how elections will turn out), but don't use a GOP talking point as justification for engaging in falsities or unfair attacks on a candidate's disability.
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