The Trump campaign greeted the Democratic National Convention with a series of negative advertisements, none harder to watch than the clip entitled, “What Happened to Joe Biden?”
Like the other recently unveiled spots, it views not so much as a campaign commercial as a trailer to a horror movie known as The Joe Biden Presidency that few wish to experience after suffering through the promotional short.
In owning up to his lies, he lied. He maintained, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.”
The commercial juxtaposes Biden at his best with a bumbling Biden stumbling through words and stuffing sentences with “you knows” and other filler phrases. It essentially presents the 2020 election as a choice between Donald Trump of the Republican Party and Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Drawing attention to the humbling indignities of the aging process seems a cheap shot 99 times out of 100. Exceptions include when the scrutinized exerts power over people, e.g., brain surgeons, airline pilots, and, yes, presidential aspirants. In such cases, kindness to the powerful means cruelty to the people.
Democrats understood this point when Ronald Reagan, four years younger than today’s Joe Biden, ran for a second term. And Reagan grasped the legitimacy of the question in deftly answering a question during the second presidential debate. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he quipped. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Walter Mondale laughed.
The handlers of Joe Biden, who permitted Cardi B. to question him (after he asked her questions first) for Elle this week, do not permit their charge to rebut the dementia charge once and for all as Reagan did. They keep him in his basement in Delaware and stage a convention with prerecorded, take-ten speeches read from teleprompters and cue cards sans a live audience. They leave nothing to chance. This avoidance of press and people tacitly acknowledges the validity of the harsh accusation — one can hardly term it an insinuation at this point — of the Trump campaign that Joe Biden better fits the favorite English word of Kim Jong-un — dotard — than does his Republican adversary.
What if Republican ad men and Democratic strategists err in their assessment of Biden as suffering from mental deterioration?
Many 77-year-olds who inarticulately issue stumbling, nonsensical statements exhibit not senility but stupidity, the same condition that afflicted them at 37, 47, 57, and 67. Us young’uns, falling for the notion that with age comes wisdom, cannot imagine that stupidity works as a lifetime sentence. Wisdom comes with age until the cobwebs grow thick, right?
Consider Biden’s response to a Democratic voter’s question about his credentials in Claremont, New Hampshire, back in 1987. “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do,” he sharply said. He boasted of winning “the outstanding student in the political science department” at the University of Delaware, in which he “graduated with three degrees,” and then “went to law school on a full academic scholarship,” where he “ended up in the top half” of his Syracuse class.
So insecure about his intellectual limitations, Biden lied about his academic achievements. He didn’t win an “outstanding student” award at Delaware, he didn’t earn three undergraduate degrees, he did not attend Syracuse Law on any academic scholarship, and he did not graduate in the top 85 percent let alone the top half of his law class. Was he really sharper at 44 than at 77?
In owning up to his lies, he lied. He maintained, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.” He must have been in a red-faced rage when he employed Sy Sperling. Even the man’s hairline lies.
When he plagiarized two decades ago in law school, he demonstrated not anger but insecurity about his own cognitive abilities vis-à-vis his peers. When he appropriated UK Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock’s family history as his own, he broadcasted both his stupidity and his insecurity. Did he think people in Great Britain do not follow U.S. politics or vice-versa? When he said, “Poor kids are just as smart and just as talented as white kids,” or “I told them, ‘If you don’t fire the prosecutor, you’re not getting the billion dollars,’ ” he again demonstrated a Not Even Your Average Joe intellectual capacity. Fools never strike as so foolish as when they imagine they can fool everyone else.
The media, who caricatured Gerald Ford, Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, and George W. Bush as dullards, ignore Subaverage Joe’s intelligence deficit. It’s uncouth, don’t you know, when you issue such assessments about a Democrat. The closest they get to this comes when they call Biden “gaffe prone,” a polite way of allowing that maybe the former vice president lacks the cerebral gifts of the president he served or the billionaire he runs against. The vacancy sign did not suddenly appear on his brain in 2020.
As George Neumayr suggests in The Biden Deception, the dimness that Republicans find disqualifying Democrats see as an opportunity. Even in 2020, Americans recalcitrantly refuse to elect the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Stacey Abrams president. So, the party’s wiser lights rush into a fool’s empty suit only planning to emerge, like clowns from a car, upon his election to the presidency that they control.
Joe Biden is smart enough to know he is stupid but dumb enough to think he can trick us into thinking he is bright.
Charlamagne Tha God, Neil Kinnock, Jill Biden’s first husband, those corrupt Ukrainians who bought U.S. policy from Hunter Biden for pennies on the dollar, that sober truck driver who Biden said “drank his lunch,” the platoon of reporters leaked Beau Biden’s dying wish that “the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values” by an unnamed source eventually outed as Joe Biden, and so many others know that if you subtract the IQ of caricatured Dan Quayle from the IQ of real Sarah Palin, you get Joe Biden.
