The Fossil vs. The Felon
We have no good choices, and are in deep doo-doo
Editor’s Note: Have a question about how to overcome brain freeze? Ask Joe Biden, whose staffers probably now have him sitting in a hot car with the windows rolled up. For all other health and wellness questions, Ask Matt Labash at askmattlabash@gmail.com
Dear Matt,
By what means can we persuade our country to declare Thursday, June 27, 2024, a National Day of Mourning? Kinky Friedman died on his ranch, and Joe Biden died on a stage. May the Jewish Cowboy rest in peace, and a once coherent president step aside.
Anthony M.
More on Kinky at the end of this piece. (You were loved, Kinkster.) But I never like to assume that readers who are here now have been here all along. So let’s take a brief walk down memory lane, shall we? A little over two years ago in this space, I wrote a piece called “Groundhog Day: Are We Doomed to a Trump v. Biden Time Loop?,” having a hunch that we were about to witness the worst sequel since Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween. In it, I noted — unkindly, said some — that Biden was now well past drinking age, “in that if he ages any more noticeably while in office, he will drive us all to drink.” (Spoiler alert: he’s aged since then.)
A little less than four months ago here, in a piece titled “The Cocoon Election: Do We Really Have To Do This Again?,” I noted an uncomfortable truth — some again said unkindly — that “the average age of our presidents leaving office is 60.08 years old. That’s 17 years younger than Trump is right now, and 21 years younger than Biden. But it gets worse. The average age of DEATH of our former presidents is 71.03 years. Six years younger than Trump, and ten years younger than Biden, before either of them even begin a second term.”
And last night — debate night — over at the New York Times, I, along with 11 other opinion-slingers, participated in a debate scorecard, chipping in our two cents. A small sample size, admittedly. But if my count’s not off, I believe 11 out of the dozen of us are Trump loathers, myself very much included. So there was arguably much built-in bias on Biden’s behalf. And yet, not a single one of us thought Biden won. In fact, seven of us (not me), thought Biden faltered so badly, that they rated Trump four points or higher on a “Trump Won” five-point scale. For my part, I observed that Biden “sounded like a dying humidifier or my great-grandfather giving his last will and testament,” that even if Biden grew stronger as the night wore on, “he seemed to be auditioning for the glue factory,” and that “the big loser tonight was my sobriety” since “the only way to face the awful choice before us is stone-cold plastered.”
Which is a colorful way of saying that with 129 days to go before the election, if Joe Biden is the only thing standing between us and a man who many like me believe is a felonious, sociopathic narcissist who has already tried to throw over democracy once, and could readily do so again, then we are in deep doo-doo.
I could paint you a rainbow over the shit slick, but I’d be lying to you if I told you otherwise, and you’d be lying to yourself if you believed me. You don’t have to like the truth to recognize it as such.
To be sure, Trump was still plenty Trumpy last night, even if he cut back his usual insanity by about 40 percent. Post-debate, Team Biden ticked off 50 Trump lies, cheekily noting that made for “16 more lies than felonies” and “48 more lies than impeachments.” CNN’s ace fact checker Daniel Dale only clocked in with 30 Trump lies, catching Trump fibbing about everything from how many Americans supported Roe getting overturned, to Biden being responsible for the biggest budget deficit ever (which happened under Trump in 2020). Whatever the actual total is, while many say Trump, too, has lost a step, I’d say let’s give credit where it’s due. Trump’s still fresh as a daisy in the lying department.
Biden, however, had about as bad a night as possible. When he wasn’t mumbling and fumbling — his voice often a hoarse whisper — he looked like an electrocuted stroke victim. Working without notes, as mandated by CNN debate rules, he clearly memorized a lot of facts, to his credit, even if he often inappropriately employed them. But without belaboring his humiliation by detailing all his mishaps, here’s a representative sample when he was asked by Jake Tapper about the soaring national debt, which Biden said he’d harness by fixing the tax system:
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do — childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the — with— with—with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with — look, if — we finally beat Medicare.
Joe Biden is not a dumb man. And I’m sure whatever was going on there made perfect sense in his head. The problem is that it didn’t quite translate to the rest of us. The lights are on, and Biden might still be home, but he’s nevertheless bumping into the furniture an awful lot.
You can prattle on in the comments section about all his accomplishments as president, and I’ll even likely agree with plenty of them. I don’t dislike Biden, and am utterly grateful to him for holding the line against the most autocratic, self-destructive, and anti-American impulses I’ve ever seen in a party that I used to call my own. But to be in the politics business is to be in the perceptions business. And when the greatest perception working against you is that you’re too old to remain president for another term, and you go out in what could end up being the only debate of the year (Trump has a habit of quitting while he’s ahead), and you do an impression of Methuselah meets Mr. Magoo, that’s not a very effective way to throw the perceptions steamroller into reverse. Trump might only be three years younger than Biden. But he might as well have been 33 years younger last night.
And if you don’t want to see Trump seize the reins of power again, after his betrayal of our country on January 6 and nearly every day after, there is no clean fix for this. Over at The Daily Beast, Jill Filipovic detailed why: throwing over your incumbent just a few months before an election feels both hubristic and dangerous, Democrats are deeply divided, the vice president is unpopular, and there’s no obvious heir.
I’d add to her list that any Democrat moderate enough to win a general is too unknown, and most of those who are well-enough known aren’t as moderate as old Uncle Joe. The swing state polls aren’t in their favor, and neither are the odds as figured by those who literally have money on the election.
So what’s the solution? Hell if I know. Readers often thump me for diagnosing problems without coming up with solutions. Though I usually do — if they’re paying close enough attention — have a solution for what ails us: make better choices. To which I should add one word: make better choices, earlier. The same way Republicans have spent eight years in denial that they’ve rented their party and their souls to a madman who’d just as soon set fire to the house as fix it, Democrats have been in denial that old age — which catches us all — is a progressive condition. (That’s “progressive” as in steadily proceeding, not as in ultra-liberal.) It’s a condition now plaguing Joe Biden in plain sight.
This is not cause for snickering or schadenfreude whether you’re on either side, have no side at all, or are planning to choose the side of the conspiracy theorist with the brain worm. These are the choices, and they’re not very good ones. When you’ve allowed yourself nothing but bad choices, you can fairly expect — barring a miracle — to suffer bad outcomes.
So don’t view Thursday night as a one-off, but as a cautionary preview. Whatever happens in this election and beyond, we have a lot of rough nights ahead.
Bonus Kinkiness: As alluded to by Anthony in the question that led us off, the Jewish cowboy/ raconteur/comic novelist/outlaw country singer Kinky Friedman died this week. I marked his passing on Substack Notes, which I will reprint here, and which includes a link to some of the most fun I’ve ever had as a magazine profiler. Kinky was only a part-time politician, but he could regularly do what so many full-timers can’t. He could move people. (In a good way.)
And here’s my old Kinky profile.
Bonus Track: Even if I didn’t love this Kinky song, I’d have to just for the title: “Jesus in Pajamas.” You might think you know Kinky Friedman from his jokey tunes, like “Asshole From El Paso.” But he made some grand weepers, too. This is one of them. He’s already missed: