The candidates: follies and fumbles
As incredible as it is to some people, including myself, Donald Trump is now officially the nominee of the Republican party for president. For the third time, Trump, a convicted felon, stands where Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan stood, not to mention Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln.
And just as incredibly, Joe Biden has yet to consolidate his hold on the Democratic nomination.
Lou Gehrig, gripped by the disease that would kill him, told baseball fans in 1939 that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Trump must feel some of what Gehrig felt. Having dodged death by inches during an assassination attempt in Butler a week ago Saturday, Trump has been on a roll of late. In addition to the good fortune of having debated a fumbling, bewildered Biden on June 27, the former president had one of two federal criminal cases against him dismissed. This followed a Supreme Court decision granting the four-time-indicted Trump broad legal immunity for his actions as president, including, possibly, his conduct relating to the attack on democracy on Jan. 6, 2021.
As veteran political pundit Jeff Greenfield observed, it “may be the biggest stretch of [good] luck by a candidate in history.”
Not so for Biden. And now he has Covid, for the second time.
While some Republicans may believe it’s all part of God’s plan to install Trump in the White House for a second time, Biden’s misfortunes are more prosaic: the years pile up, the mind and body slow down.
Recently, the president sat for an interview with Lester Holt of NBC-News. He told Holt, “My mental acuity is pretty good. I’ve gotten more done than any president in a long, long time in three-and-a-half years. I’m willing to be judged on that.”
Holt pressed the president on the ways and means of lowering the political heat, in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life and an Oval Office address in which Biden decried the prevalence of violent rhetoric in our political discourse.
With his White House speech, Biden had painted himself into a corner: The offending rhetoric had mostly come from Republicans and Trump in particular, yet Biden appeared to put everyone, including himself, in the same boat.
Now, with Holt, he tried a form of bailing. President Biden, according to the NBC transcript of the conversation, said:
“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president [Trump] says things like he says? Do you not say anything ’cause it may incite someone? Look, I-I-I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my-my-my opponent had engaged in that rhetoric. Talking about there will be a bloodbath if he loses.”
All of that is okay, except for the way it was said, which had nothing to do with the lingering effects of Biden’s childhood stutter. It was said slowly (as opposed to deliberately). It was not said crisply. The sentences and words, regardless of how they look on paper, were limp, they drooped, at times they ran together.
Joe Biden is not senile. Far from it. What he lacks, at age 81, is a certain verbal dexterity. He barges his way into answers, the way some old people barge into traffic, and then fumbles his way across the conversational intersection. Sometimes he doesn’t get exactly where he means to go. Most of the time he gets there, circuitously.
A day or so after the Holt interview, the president spoke with media hipster Speedy Morman for the podcast 360 With Speedy. The result was the same halting style, which prompted Ezra Klein of the New York Times to say on X: “This is [an] interview aimed at an audience Biden badly needs to win over: Young men who get their news on YouTube. I don’t know how you can watch this and say he still has the campaign skills….”
Klein added, “Campaign skills aren’t everything, but they are something, particularly when you’re behind.”
According to polling, Biden is behind Trump, though not by much. This sets up a nightmare scenario for Democrats, who fear Biden’s weakness will drag down the party’s House and Senate candidates as well.
Bill Clinton’s 2002 political axiom needs an update: “Strong (sounding) and wrong beats weak (sounding) and right every time.”
Despite Trump’s rambling, annoyingly long – actually, over-long – mean-spirited, same old, same old convention acceptance speech on Thursday, Republicans are riding high, for the moment. As Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
There have been June and July surprises. Don’t be startled if there are one or two more as the campaigns stagger to November.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.