MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace conducted an interview with Joe Biden (if you can call it that) that came across more like twenty minutes of a middle-aged daughter trying to help dad remember where he is. It was a rarity for Joe — nearly all of his conversations with the media of any length these days are pre-taped, not live — and it did not end well. In fact, it was so awkward that the video posted by the network cuts off abruptly so as not to show Biden wandering off the set as if seeking a bowl of porridge and a nightcap.
At this stage in his obvious mental decline, Biden can only manage about fifteen minutes of unscripted remarks before he slips into broken sentences, impossible to diagram, that meander between fond personal memories and aw shucks “it ain’t your father’s Republican Party” bullet points hammered so deeply into his psyche that he leans on them in moments of confusion.
If Biden were capable of more awareness, he’d understand that many of those bullet points are directly at odds. He reiterates he’ll be a president for all Americans, then calls all Republicans extremists. He says, “remember when I said we could still do bipartisan things and they said we couldn’t do it? Well, we didn’t get a lot, but we got a lot of bipartisan things done.” He remarks, “Like I said, I’m going to be down there to congratulate him” with no apparent indication who he’s imagining he’s going to congratulate, or what for, or where, or when.
Keep in mind that Biden is still just eighty — he’ll be eighty-two next November. As of now, Americans are likely to see a slap fight between a seventy-eight-year-old who seems like he’s running out of gas, sorting through golf shirts and war plans and old copies of the New York Times where he’s circled things with a Sharpie, and an eighty-one-year-old who stumbles from one gaffe to another, and meanders around television sets like a gray ghost of Christmas past, and needs to be hooked up to an oxygen tank so regularly that it leaves indents on his face.
Other than that, things are going pretty well.
