President Joe Biden has two speeds these days: doddering, confused old man and yelling, angry old man.
Democrats and the news media love Yelling, Angry Old Man Biden, as we saw when they cheered on his yelling, angry State of the Union address.
But Yelling, Angry Old Man Biden should be understood as just the geriatric version of Angry, Nasty Joe Biden.
Biden has a soft side, to be sure. He gushes over his children and grandchildren. He shows compassion for the suffering and the less well-off. But a huge part of his success in politics has been being a total jerk.
Don’t get me wrong: Being a jerk is occasionally appropriate. Also, as a New Yorker and an extroverted male, I often come across as a jerk, so I don’t really mind most of Biden’s combativeness. (When he deflected a question of mine decades ago by accusing my parents of being illegal immigrants, I took it in stride.)
Going into Thursday night’s debate against former President Donald Trump, it’s important to be prepared for Biden’s primary debating tactic: immature, dishonest barbs that are primarily intended to confuse and anger the opponent and secondarily to win plaudits from fans in the media.
When Biden attacked Pete Buttigieg in 2016 for being too inexperienced, a reporter reminded him that this was the same attack Biden had leveled against Barack Obama in 2008. This was a good point by the reporter: Haven’t you, Joe Biden, shown that your accusations of inexperience are contentless and poor predictors of governing ability, or do you believe Obama was unprepared for the job in 2008?
Biden, of course, had no answer to this. He never intended to. He was setting up a one-two punch — he was baiting the reporter to compare Buttigieg to Obama. When the reporter took the bait, Biden shot back: “Oh, come on, man! This guy’s not a Barack Obama!”
If you’re paying attention, you realize this doesn’t address the critique of Biden. Biden is granting that the guy he previously called unprepared was, by his own assessment, totally prepared — but he’s doing so in a way that seems to attack Buttigieg for being a young man in a hurry.
Biden played the same immature, irrational, and stupid card against Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate, which was Biden’s quintessential debate performance. In that case, he won rave reviews from liberal journalists for interrupting, glowering, laughing, and launching similar immature, aggressive attacks.
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Separately, Biden called a reporter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” and another a “stupid son of a bitch.”
Now, it’s possible that Biden is too old and tired to do this routine this week. But we can assume that the plan is just to attack and mock Trump personally. Does Biden have it in him to be a massive bullying jerk just one or two more times?
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