It’s hard to know at this elder-care stage of life whether Biden is rewriting history intentionally or because he can no longer remember it.
In news of the forgotten, theoretical president Joe Biden emerged from cryosleep or wherever it is they stash him when not at the beach to sit down with the adoring ladies of ABC’s The View this morning. The interview didn’t make much news — Joe Biden looked as desiccated and vacant-eyed as ever, doing his best impression of Imhotep post-mummification. But the bandages never really started to unravel this time, as they have so often threatened to in the past.
I don’t begrudge the old man for going onto a network TV kaffeeklatsch to be given a warm embrace and a “world’s greatest ousted president” mug by the hosts: Biden looks like he could use a bit of cheering up lately, in all honesty. (Or maybe that’s just the way his face always looks now.) And it’s a sad comment on Kamala Harris that if she actually took unscripted questions from the ladies of The View, that would probably rate her most difficult interview of the campaign season.
Biden couldn’t help but rewrite his past, however, when it came to the very first question of the interview: Why did you drop out? Biden’s answer was typical of his present state of eloquence: “Look, when I ran, uh, the first, uh this, the, for my first, this last term, I said that I was gonna, I saw myself as a transition president, transitioning to a new generation of leadership.” He then made a canned joke about his age, which landed flat, and summarized thusly: “What happened was we ha-having so many, so much success involving getting things done those people thought we couldn’t get done, I found myself, uh, having used more time, than I would have ordinarily, to pass that torch.”
To steal a line from Donald Trump, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows what he said either.” It’s hard to know at this elder-care stage of life whether Biden is rewriting history intentionally or because he can no longer remember it, but Joe Biden was seeking another four years of the presidency as recently as July. If Donald Trump hadn’t stupidly consented to debate him before either party’s convention, then he would still be the candidate today, and Democrats would be doomed. He is not running right now only because the debate revealed to the world his mental collapse beyond possibility of question.
Other than that, Biden happily tossed a grenade into Kamala’s lap during his View appearance by trying to build her up: “As vice president there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do, and so I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.” Leaving aside the fact that, taken literally, Biden just boasted that he delegated everything in his presidency to Harris (a laughable notion), that doesn’t strike me as the sort of endorsement Kamala Harris wants or needs right now. Harris has been running from Biden’s economic record — more accurately, running from questions about Biden’s economic record — ever since she got into the race, because she has no good answers for them. When Joe Biden appears suddenly on television, like Banquo’s ghost at the dinner, it bodes ill for Harris; everybody sees the corpse in the room this time, not just her, and nobody wants to be reminded of it.