If he were one of our baddest presidents rather than one of the worst, he could simply laugh it off.
If he were one of our baddest presidents rather than one of the worst, he could simply laugh it off.
‘I ’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” So goes President Biden’s response to George Stephanopoulos’s question near the end of the ABC interview last Friday: “And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?” Or so went the line, anyway, which immediately became the most discussed moment of the 22-minute event.
That night, Axios, under the headline “Biden at peace if he loses to Trump: ‘As long as I gave it my all,’” promulgated without comment a slightly different transcription: “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Did the president indeed say what NR’s Mark Antonio Wright and many others recorded as “the goodest [sic] job”? And if so, was “as good a job” an attempt — very likely a well-meaning one — to make a few mumbled syllables by the president sound, well, a bit more presidential?
This turns out to be the wrong question. By the next afternoon, ABC, seemingly under some pressure from the White House, had altered the official transcript to yet something else: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” And the network added the terse, unironic note, “This transcript has been updated for clarity.”
For what it’s worth, I hear “the goodest job” (21:54 here). What matters, though, is not what I hear but rather what the president actually said, what the president’s handlers insist he said, and what the media tell the public he said.
On this subject, Maureen Dowd’s latest column in the New York Times is spot-on. (That’s not a sentence I’m used to writing.)
Actually, let me revise that: Dowd, who also hears “the goodest job,” is almost spot-on. I do have one linguistic objection to what she and others have said — or, rather, not said — about Biden’s rhetoric. But it is not a trivial objection.
Let’s agree for the sake of argument that Biden did not actually say “I did as good a job as I know I can do.” At issue, then, is whether he said “I did the goodest job” or “I did the good as job.” And this leads to the question: Which is more worrying?
The answer from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and from the media is that the former is more worrying, or at least that the latter is no more worrying than the former. At a time when the president’s every syllable is being examined under a microscope, the White House would hardly suggest that ABC change a transcript to make him look worse. And as for Dowd, she writes that a Biden campaign spokesman requested that she “‘tweak’ the column and change the word ‘goodest’ to make [her] piece ‘consistent with the corrected transcript,’ even though the revised version was also gobbledygook.”
In fact, neither is gobbledygook, a word the OED defines as “language or jargon . . . which is pretentious, long-winded, or specialized to the point of being unintelligible.” But — this is the important point — “the goodest job” and “the good as job” present entirely different sorts of errors.
People are going into conniptions on social media because of “goodest,” but regularizing an irregular superlative is a small lexical mistake that any of us could make, though ideally when tired or tipsy in the company of friends (or five years old). One of our best poets and playwrights, John Dryden, made this mistake — presumably for him no mistake — in 1694: “The goodest Old Man.” “The goodest job” is still English, just not quite what everyone expects to hear, and the extra “as” in “the goodest job as I know I can do” is a linguistic blip. If, in 2024, Biden were one of our baddest presidents rather than one of the worst, he could simply laugh it off.
By contrast, “the good as job” is not English. This is no small lexical mistake. It is a major syntactic error. I am not a physician, but someone who words puts in order the wrong and who mixes up small “function words” like “a” and “as” would appear to be exhibiting symptoms of aphasia, which is a serious medical condition.
If President Biden did indeed say “the good as job,” that is yet another sign that he needs to step down. But if Biden is like Dryden (another phrase I’m not used to writing) and merely said “the goodest job,” as I believe he did, that does not in itself disqualify him from the highest office in the land. There are, of course, plenty of other disqualifications.