Its better and worse…
You would think this post is about marriage, but it isn’t. Its actually about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden’s presidential debate makes me thankful to be British. (I will do a British election post later) but in the meantime… Its time to talk about Joe Biden.
Unlike most people I watched the entire presidential debate, not just taking other people’s word for it… I also listened to his press conference after the NATO summit….
So in summary, its better and its worse.
Firstly, context. The office of the President of the United States is one of immense detail, immense gravity and immense importance. Any one of these post holders has to grasp an immense amount of knowledge, and nuance and be able to communicate it effectively. All the armchair critics should sit down… No. You can’t do his job… So in that respect, he is doing phenomenally well. He’s 81 with more detail in his head than me at 32.
The problem is that both the Democratic party and the Republican party are both completely out of ideas. Its as if no one has any policies anymore. It’s just about keeping the people who have been in power the past 40 years in power. Yes my darlings you’ve had a phenomenal career, please step down… as you should have done in 2010… We’re in 2024. We are still being ruled by baby boomers, and in Biden’s case the Silent Generation. He was born in World War 2. NATO was started when he was 6. So he could have vague memories of it starting, but that is aside the point. Similarly in the UK there is just a complete vacuum of policies. Nothing is changing. People have given up hoping because the last time they were hopeful of things being better is about 2016. Before Brexit, before COVID, before the cost of living crisis and the Ukraine war. People need hope more than ever and politicians are just not serving it.
But back to Joe Biden. There are layers to this… He originally tried to be president in 1988. when he was 46. That’s a reasonable age. He tried again in 2008. at 66, which if he’d won instead of Obama, meant that he’d have finished his 2 terms younger than when he became president. Its not that he’s too old, its that he had his time, multiple times, and it wasn’t to be. This office was not for him. Some people have a sense of destiny, sense of entitlement. Look at Boris Johnson in the UK, constantly writing about Churchill, believed he deserved to be prime minister, without any thought as to what he’d do when he got there. Events (Covid) destroyed him, but he was well on his way to destroying himself. (Proroguing parliament and lying to the Queen) Obama wanted to do things, Biden wants to be president. Trump wants to die in office so they can never prosecute him. (I said what I said) Trump was another person who wanted to be president because he wanted to be president. Same with Jeremy Corbyn, same with Ed Milliband, same with Liz Truss. Not everyone falls into that category. Rishi Sunak wanted to be Prime Minister so he could clean up the conservatives messes. Then was left carrying the can. Kier Starmer wants to be Prime Minister because he’s basically disgusted with the populist nonsense of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, aside from cleaning up the name of politics I don’t see what he really can and will do. We have had too many leaders who aren’t leaders, they just want attention. Your mothers should have hugged you more. They are merely narcisissts in chief, not actual leaders. They push the work to others and take credit because that’s all they are there to do.
But back to Biden. The honest truth is you can see he is old. He talks like an old man, he has a presidential voice, which he uses but what I observed in the NATO summit press conference was far more sinister and no one is talking about it in this side of the Atlantic, there are 3 elements to the Biden voice.
Normal, presidential, fairly monotone, voice. When he is thinking clearly and coherently in a constant stream. He sounds like an old man, but still a presidential old man. He sometimes he changes points really radically and you don’t understand what he’s saying.
The “mind stutter” voice, which as it points to, is not when his voice stutters but his brain, you can hear and see his brain turn off on one sentence and turn onto another, like someone has flipped an on/off switch inside him and he’s rebooting in real time.
The scary voices. At one point he was kind of shouting for no reason (remember this is a press conference, he’s mic’d up to the nines and everyone is listening to what he is saying, so there is no need to speak above a conversational volume) then he went from that high to a low, a whisper, which again, is quite scary. It’s like he’s the Joker.
Ultimately you can’t tell me that no one in the Democrats can do a better job of communicating, you can’t tell me that the Republicans only have a criminal to put forward? I sincerely doubt it. I think that’s the real problem, because if there was someone else, they’d have said so. But on both sides, both parties don’t have anyone. No one they’d trust with high office. No one they think is less bad than what they have. The Democrats don’t want Kamala Harris. No offense to her, but aside from being black and Indian and a woman, I don’t see anything particularly impressive about her.
What I want and need from politicians of this generation is a bit of realism, i.e. you aren’t the centre of the universe. You also don’t have the right to be a politician, some self belief is important, but belief in your country and actual ideas are more important. Therefore you don’t have the right to power. In the UK we literally have politicians who won elections because it was their “turn.”
Heaven help us.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith