Why Joe Biden Acts Like This
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We used to know how Joe Biden felt about pretty much everything.
He was a loquacious oversharer, a man who never wore a poker face because he played every game as an open hand, cards laid right on the table in front of him for all to see.
Strom Thurmond?
We knew what Joe thought.
Boris Yeltsin?
We knew what Joe thought.
The Pork Producers Tent at the Iowa state fair?
We knew what Joe thought.
How to deal with a partition of Iraq?
We knew what Joe thought.
His plight as Barack Obama’s second banana?
We knew what Joe thought.
But now, even close and longtime students of Joe Biden rarely know what he thinks…about almost anything.
Like, what does he really think?
There are exceptions.
We know, for instance, what he thinks of his new dog.
But what can you say you know or, even, feel you might know, about what Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. thinks about:
* The need to balance public urgency with calm in addressing the nation over COVID.
* What his former adviser Andy Slavitt said on MSNBC Monday about what’s coming: “It’s going to be a surge like we haven’t seen before, numbers that are completely out of control.”
* This (from an absolutely essential reading piece in the Washington Post): “[A]t a moment of great urgency — both for the nation’s health and the president’s standing — he has few new tools at his disposal, at least not politically palatable ones, and public health experts fear that exhausted Americans have tuned out their warnings.”
* The fact that his major speech addressing the nation about the pandemic is at 2:30pm ET – not in primetime, as at least some of his predecessors would have chosen on this occasion.
* The widespread criticism that, when it comes to handling COVID, his performance is not much different than his predecessor on the Three Cs: clarity, consistency and credibility.
* The (new) advent of a tale of two Americas, with Blue shutting down over omicron and Red staying open.
* The current state of scientific knowledge about the virus, including omicron.
* The need for a well-thought-through and tough plan to whip inflation now.
* What to do about Joe Manchin and the state of the administration’s legislative agenda.
* His party’s debate on the fairness and political sense of the SALT deduction.
* The rampant crime in America’s cities – and how to address it.
* The causes of the crisis at the border — and how to address it substantively and politically.
* The Squad.
* His deeply sagged job approval ratings.
* The decision of many of his top advisers (and hers…) to promiscuously share their view that Kamala Harris is a Veep project beyond redemption.
* What he plans to do about the prospects encapsulated by the last sentence of Doug Sosnik’s essential reading piece about the coming apocalyptic changes in the Republican Party and, thus, in America: “The tremors felt during the Trump presidency and even the Jan. 6 Capitol siege will feel relatively mild compared to the days and months ahead.”
* The first-in-the-nation status of Iowa and New Hampshire.
* What the Clintons and Obamas think of his presidency.
* That the view of many of his old friends on the right is encapsulated by these passages from a Gerard Baker column in the Wall Street Journal:
In short, the party that constantly seeks control over our lives is now governing—or failing to govern—a nation that is spinning wildly out of control….
It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that this is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.
Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency, is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.
One possible explanation for the lack of a public window into what Joe Biden is thinking about all of these important matters is that, as president, he has miraculously developed a heretofore unexhibited steely discipline, in which he knowingly is reaping the benefits of breaking a professional logorrhean lifetime of being a gaffe-prone open book.
That is one possible explanation.
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Hot off the presses, here is the new White House fact sheet previewing the president’s afternoon speech.
It starts thusly:
Today, President Biden will announce new actions to protect Americans and help communities and hospitals battle Omicron, building on the robust plan he announced earlier this month to get people maximum protection ahead of the winter and prepare for rising cases driven by the new variant.
By way of comparison, here is the White House fact sheet on the same topic from December 2, less than three weeks ago.
That one opened like this:
Today, President Biden will announce new actions to combat COVID-19 as the United States heads into the winter months and with the emergence of a new variant, Omicron.
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