Friday's postcard, and the misery of Joe Biden's face plant

June 28, 2024

The Medicine Wheel at the crest of the Bighorn Mountains east of Lovell, Wyoming

Meanwhile, at the volcano….

Given the stakes involved there was no way to avoid what was on yesterday’s calendar, not just for Americans coming up on the most consequential election in a lifetime, but for the human race generally. This is not hyperbole.

You can slice the chatter, spatter, spending, fuming and gaslighting of our politics in a myriad ways. But one number speaks for itself.

It’s the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide routinely sampled at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. When the measurements began in 1958 it was below 320 parts per million (ppm). This week it’s running at over 425 ppm. It’s an ominous number. Polar ice sheets are melting. Coral reefs are dying off due to excess carbolic acid in sea water. In lay person’s terms it means the Earth is running a dangerous fever.

I offer that figuratively but, in the event you missed it, at least 1,301 Muslim pilgrims who traveled to Mecca for the Hajj two weeks ago died due to extreme heat. A few days ago the Washington Post ran a story with a picture of an elegantly dressed couple from Maryland posing with smiles at the beginning of their journey. They both died. It is enough to make you cry.

Joe Biden accepts that climate change is real and, among other efforts, invested tens of billions of federal dollars to addressing the crisis in his 2021 infrastructure bill. Trump boasts about withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate treaty shortly after he took office in 2017.

Elections have consequences. It was Joe Biden’s job last night to make clear that he accepts and acts on the science of human-caused global warming and to remind voters, in plain terms, that Donald Trump has called global warming a “hoax” and recently convened meetings with oil company executives asking for billions in campaign cash in exchange for regulatory favors. But Biden didn’t. It was just one of many gobsmacking, unforced errors he committed during last night’s debacle.

To cite another example, the obvious and most efficient answer to Trump’s immigration horror stories was for Biden to simply remind the audience that he’d reached a deal on a border compromise with Republican negotiators, including conservative Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford. But Trump killed the initiative by persuading other Republicans that it was more important for him to have the border “crisis” as a campaign issue, than to have a bipartisan agreement to address the problems. People can understand that, and they need to, as it goes to the insidious cynicism that defines the very essence of Trumpism. Instead, Biden was left sputtering as he rushed to fact check Trump on the details of fighting fentanyl smuggling.

Front page of the Huffpost after last night’s debate in Atlanta

The impression I had is that Biden was:

a) Not well; that his voice was muted and weak. He reportedly came down with a cold just before the debate.

b) Over-loaded with facts and (as can happen) got disoriented digging into his memory pockets for data at the expense of simply telling the story. Time and again he got sacked by the pressure of trying to wedge his fact-checking details into the tight time spaces. So he tried to talk faster, which only had the effect of making him sound desperate and—in the frayed threads of his voice—all the more unintelligible.

Trump, on the other hand, spoke with a much clearer voice and paced cadence. Granted he was lying his ass off all night. But that’s just predictable, classic Trump—the demonic gift of being able to lie without a wince of conscience. Trump stream-rolled Biden with over thirty whopping lies. I used to be a tennis player. The image in my mind is that Biden brought a badminton racquet to a Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic. It was ugly, and shockingly so.

“It was a nightmare…”

I follow Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo as it’s one of a new generation of smarter journalism projects that are moving beyond “he said, she said” mode of reporting. It’s not easy.

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