Channeling his inner Hillary Clinton, who just couldn’t understand why she wasn’t 50 points ahead of Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, a forlorn Joe Scarborough told his audience after the 2024 presidential debate that he has “no idea why this race is close.”
Scarborough asks a good question, but not for the reason he thinks. Joe Biden’s approval rating of 38.7% in the 13th quarter of his presidency is the lowest in history, so he is arguably punching above his presidency’s weight in the polling. To put things in perspective for Scarborough, who claims he “will destroy anyone” who challenges Joe Biden’s record of excellence as president, Jimmy Carter’s approval rating in April of 1980 was nine points higher at 47.7%.
There’s an interesting factoid here, of which Joe Scarborough and Co. are almost certainly ignorant. As Annie Linskey relates in her excellent article at the Wall Street Journal, there was a coordinated effort to replace Jimmy Carter on the 1980 Democrat ticket — and among the leading conspirators was none other than Joseph R. Biden.
Back then, Biden was a relative newcomer to the D.C. scene, but also an undeniably slippery and effective politician. “That man’s in trouble, politically in trouble,” Biden correctly said of Carter. He wanted a president that could keep the White House, and he wasn’t “certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now.”
The problem wasn’t that the incumbent was showing clear signs of cognitive and physical impairment, or that he had difficulty functioning outside the hours of 10AM and 4PM. Americans were undoubtedly more serious people back then, and the mere thought of such circumstances for a candidate in a tightly-contested presidential race would have undoubtedly yielded swift replacement.
No, Biden’s problem with Carter, if you could believe it, was that Carter’s budget proposal lacked the necessary reduction in government spending and a needed “pull back on taxes.” Biden also thought it best for Democrats to promote (get ready for your mind to be blown) “across-the-board budget cuts and employment ceilings” for federal agencies.
“There’s a helluva lot of fat” in those agencies, Joe Biden said at the time. His employment of such colloquial language, easily understood among working class Americans, would go on to become a staple of his long career.
In April of 1980, Biden stumped for Carter in Pennsylvania, carefully crafting his message. “Let’s face it, Jimmy Carter isn’t the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming,” he said, “but he’s doing a good job.”
Biden was a far less devoted lickspittle for Carter in 1980 than Joe Scarborough is for Biden in 2024, whose solemn diatribe after the debate included nearly seven minutes of such sycophantic drivel as “without any apology, I love Joe Biden” and that “Joe Biden has been the most effective president,” with only one moment to say, in a waffly sort of way, that perhaps he’s not the right candidate for this moment.
Mika Brzezinski continued, saying that Biden “could not land a thought, not even in the closing statement” which is “the easiest part -- you write down a few words, go through the thoughts.”Scarborough and Brzezinski were, like millions of other Americans on the left and right, shocked by Biden’s inability to think or speak coherently on the debate stage, or in a follow-up interview with George Stephanopoulos which had to have been nightmarish for Democrats hoping he’d quickly right the ship. But now that Biden’s family has determined that they’re digging in, they are asking their audience to pretend that they should have never been shocked by these awful performances, and neither should you.
Brzezinski: Everyone was watching the Stephanopoulos interview, and obviously the debate performance. Joe Biden, it’s not like this is the first time he flubs his words…
Scarborough: He’s been doing it for about 54 years…
Brzezinski: Yeah, no, how old is he? He has a stutter, on top of that, he flubs his words. He mangles his words. He’s not an expert in elocution and Ivy League phraseology, and never will be. But now everyone’s looking at it like it’s new.
She’s correct that Biden’s never spoken like an Ivy Leaguer. The suggestion that Jimmy Carter isn’t “the finest thing since wheat cakes” or “the second coming” isn’t an appeal to people who communicate like Ivy Leaguers. And while this point may be lost on Scarborough and Brzezinski, who eloquently speak into a tiny bubble of MSNBC viewers who are often either Ivy Leaguers or like to pretend that they are, most Americans hate that, and generally find it pretentious and absurd.
But their suggestion that Joe Biden has never been able to talk well or effectively communicate his thoughts, so therefore his current inability to speak or communicate thoughts shouldn’t be a reason for alarm, is utterly ridiculous.
And it’s peak gaslighting.
Few Americans might know it, and even fewer might believe it after having witnessed the decaying specimen that has been serving as president these past years, but there was once a time when Joe Biden was referred to by a fawning media as “The Great Talker.”
Nearly fourteen years ago, that’s how I vividly recall fangirl Lisa DePaulo referred to him in a GQ interview. The polished Barack Obama was “the Great Orator,” she suggested, while she labeled the coarse Joe Biden as “the Great Talker.” She acknowledges that Biden can’t “raise the rafters like his boss,” but “nobody can flat-out talk like Joe Biden.”
One might think that a backhanded compliment, but Biden certainly would never have taken it as such at any point in his career. Just as a professional wrestler fashions a persona, Biden had adopted the stage name of “Scranton Joe,” champion of the middle class against the Washington elites and big corporations.
And while DePaulo suggests that she doesn’t share his affection for their mutual hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, she appears to revel in his quaint Scranton-isms like “Yer’ kiddin’ me!” and “I’ll be damned” and “God love ‘em,” and is thankful that “the Scranton thing” gets her an extra twenty minutes of interview time and a “big hug.”
Joe Biden has always been gaffe-prone, that’s certain. But his propensity to sometimes do and say stupid things is not the same as saying that he has always been unable to communicate with people as he appears to us now. We have countless hours of video of him leading spirited inquisitions on Capitol Hill over several decades, including partisan witch-hunts against Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas — and all without any hint of his recent cognitive or speech problems.
There are few who could have said that Joe Biden ever had a brilliant mind, even in his prime. As a matter of domestic policy, he has blown with the winds of his party, wafting to-and-fro as the social tapestry changed over the decades, without any thought of fiscal responsibility or the inflationary outcomes, growing federal agencies and the federal government beyond anything ever seen in this country, supporting an open border policy allowing an invasion by illegal aliens, and supporting radical social upheaval in the form of promoting such things as racial preference in employment to castrating children as a means of affirming gender dysphoria. As a matter of foreign policy, he was, as former defense Secretary Robert Gates once described him, “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” which even left-leaning Politifact rates as Mostly True.
None of that appears to have changed, despite MSNBC hosts insisting to a small minority of American viewers that the vast majority of Americans are wrong in disapproving of Joe Biden’s presidency. The only thing that has changed is that the “Great Talker” quite obviously can’t talk, walk, or function after 4PM anymore.
And you and I, along with 80% of other Americans, are not crazy for noticing that, or the obvious reason for it.