Joe Biden’s address to the NAACP in Detroit Sunday demonstrates the extreme risk the president’s handlers take in allowing him to debate Donald Trump.
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The scripted speech required nine post-delivery revisions by the White House. The errors corrected included quotidian ones of the like not just 81-year-olds but 18-year-olds make in conversation, such as when he claimed: “Black moms, who have [sic] nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than a white woman.”
Understandable small flubs combined into a large embarrassment, highlighted when he called the Jan. 6 protesters not “insurrectionists” but “erectionists.”
Did he possibly mean Sergeant Miles, the adult film actor sentenced to prison for his role in the Capitol Hill riot whose other roles include Submitting to Sergeant Miles, Raw Power, and Menage a Trans 8?
The most Bidenesque of the gaffes occurred when the president detailed how during the coronavirus pandemic Barack Obama sent him, his vice president, to Detroit to help fix matters. Obama left office about three years prior to the first COVID-19 death in the United States.
“When I was vice president,” Biden recalled, “things were kind of bad during the pandemic, and what happened was Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it.’”
The White House insisted the president meant recession and not pandemic, and the cure presumably intended to refer to the automobile industry and not ailing patients. Granting this leaves alive the realization that this man frequently shifts around events and personalities not just by mere years but by decades (see his recent conversation with François Mitterrand, 1918–1996, about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot).
The president’s detractors likely look at the nine corrections from just one speech as Exhibit 129b for the case for senility. This misses a few more salient points. First, Sen. Biden periodically said ridiculously foolish and outright false statements as a younger man. Then, stupidity rather than senility served as the explanation. Cannot dumb young people become dumb old people? Second, the primary problem illustrated by his Detroit speech pertained not to slips of the tongue and brain but to his lack of social comfort around African Americans.
Recall in 2012 when he accused Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney before a largely black audience of seeking to “put y’all back in chains”; in 2020 when he insisted to Charlamagne tha God that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”; and his repeated claims that South African authorities arrested him for protesting the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela or that police in Delaware arrested him for defending a black family moving into a white neighborhood, a yarn he told Howard Stern just last month. And, of course, few can forget Lifeguard Joe’s story of gaining Corn Pop’s respect.
In Detroit in front of the NAACP, the president spoke of his political enemies “trying to erase Black history” and how Donald Trump “worsens the mortality rate for Black moms.”
He feels it necessary to lie about himself or his political adversaries when among African Americans. He adopts verbiage and a speaking cadence foreign to his own that he presumably thinks allows him to fit in with people with whom he clearly does not. His oration drifts into demagoguery, a comment about him but more so about his low opinion of his audience.
Yes, the Detroit speech, overflowing with errors and lies, presents a politician dangerous to leave alone in front of a camera without a script. More so does it display that politician’s awkwardness around African Americans.
Juxtapose Biden’s weirdness with Charlamagne tha God with the ease of Donald Trump interacting with staff and customers at an Atlanta Chick-fil-A and visiting a Harlem bodega as black and brown voices chanted “Trump” and “USA” last month. Republicans in banker suits often less naturally mixed among African Americans than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. The roles have reversed in 2024, which helps explain a boom in the support of blacks for Trump, particularly black men.
A New York Times/Siena College poll from earlier this spring indicated a more than quintupling of Trump’s support among African Americans since 2020 (4 percent to 23 percent).
Yes, Sunday’s scripted speech foreshadowed the disaster of leaving the president on a debate stage for 90 minutes in an unscripted environment. That a Democratic president felt it necessary to shore up African American support by giving a speech to the NAACP in Detroit, and another address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, indicates the disaster for a party that can no longer count on its most loyal constituency for lockstep support.
