Some voters in the Democratic Party’s base say their party’s front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, former Vice President Joe Biden, is too old and losing it. The verbal gaffes, the rambling answers, his eye filling up with blood during a CNN appearance — if Biden’s not too old now, would he be too old in nine years at age 85 as he would be finishing off his second term?
The thing is, Biden’s not making any more gaffes than he ever used to. His political career has been full of them. Recently, Biden claimed that it’s “mindless” that we haven’t banned magazines with more than one bullet in them. When visiting Dartmouth last month Biden said, “I’m not going nuts,” which is something that we’ll decide for you, Mr. Vice President. Confusing New Hampshire with Vermont can happen to anyone, it’s just that a presidential candidate, even in the primaries, has a staffer whose job is to, just before starting the speech or visit, remind the politician exactly where he is — town, state, and, where necessary, country and century.
The list of gaffes is interestingly long, but not entirely recent. In his 2008 campaign (you know, the one where he won the pitcher of warm spit prize of being vice president) he said that Hillary Clinton would be a better candidate and performer than he would. He asked a paralyzed state senator to get up out of his wheelchair, stand up, and take the applause of the crowd. He said Obama was the first “mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
Biden stumbling over his own tongue just isn’t a new thing. So why is so much being made of it? Part of it is simply that other candidates and their supporters want to find something, anything, to stab him in the back. That’s what primaries are about: making sure the other candidates fail so that one can serenely move through the pack to grab that brass ring of the nomination.
But there’s more to it this time around, as well. Biden, when he’s got any observable political or other position, is a centrist. Democratic Party activists, the only people really interested at this stage, aren’t centrist any more. They want to be, at the very least, radically progressive. It’s not certain the rest of the country is so enamored of socialism, but we haven’t counted yet and won’t until the actual election.
This time around, there’s more than just the personal jockeying for ambition against Biden, there’s also that ideological drive to it all.
That’s why people are talking about Biden’s gaffes more often. Not because there are more of them, nor because they’re worse, just because there’s more incentive to make something of them.
This really isn’t new at all. Way back in 1987, Biden’s first run for the nomination derailed when he plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. Stealing bits of a speech from someone who got steamrollered by Maggie Thatcher might not be all that much of an error to be honest, she tended to have that effect upon opposition. But from someone who then went on to lose to John Major?
I do think that people are being more than a little unfair to Biden at present. It really isn’t true that he’s too old and losing it. Joe’s problem is he never did have it in the first place.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
