"This happened on Tuesday but playing with Google a bit, the story has been covered by Fox News, the Washington Free Beacon, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Western Journalism Center--all hard-right outlets that would be expected to hype any bad news about some Democrat. From my Google searches, which used keywords then the exact Biden quote, it looks like almost no one else has covered it."A Mediaite article was the only coverage I found from a non-hard-right outlet.
"This isn't a new phenomenon. The same thing initially happened when Biden recently described having given a speech in Burlington, Vermont when, in fact, he'd given it only a few days earlier in Burlington, Iowa. The corporate press is covering for Biden... The press does the public a grave disservice when it behaves in this way. But that, which is really obvious, doesn't even begin to cover this problem of multinationals manipulating public opinion."The evidence that Biden has suffered serious cognitive impairment has been quite abundant since he entered the presidential race last year. In a lengthy article in August about Biden's history, I described him as "a real mess--confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding 'his' proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else..." The January introduction to the Extra Newsfeed version of that article focused on only a few weeks of Biden's constant blunders. By no means comprehensive even within its limited timeframe, it ran long enough that it was almost an article unto itself. Biden can sometimes appear relatively lucid when tightly scripted and well-rehearsed but get him speaking off the top of his head and he loses names, events, can't correctly remember even relatively recent things. At his worst--which, disturbingly, is where one finds him as often as not--he can barely form coherent words, can barely marshal the words he can manage into coherent sentences and doesn't even seem to know where he is; he can talk for minutes at a time without it being at all clear what he's trying to say or what he's even talking about. His habit in recent months of trying to speak at a faster clip and often yelling--a poor effort to simulate Bernie Sanders' passionate delivery--have made it even worse.
Compounding this further still is the fact that Biden, even back when he was firing on all cylinders, was both an imbecile and an inveterate liar, in the habit of regularly saying mindnumbingly stupid things and fond of concocting elaborate, dramatic--or melodramatic--fictions, often casting himself in an heroic or visionary role. For example, right-wing writer Byron York was only exaggerating a little when he wrote in February that Biden has, throughout the campaign, "tried to take credit for virtually every other candidates' initiatives, which he claimed to have accomplished himself at some distant point during his 40-plus year career in government." Sometimes, it's hard to know which of these dynamics are in play or to what extent.
The corporate press has reacted to all of this in a few ways. The first and most common is to simply ignore it. Biden says these things and most of them either aren't covered at all or receive so little coverage they may as well not have even been mentioned. The next is occasionally covering them but presenting them as merely "gaffes," like some perhaps charming personality quirk rather than a sign of a serious problem. Still another, a subset of that last, is going "horserace" on this, presenting Biden "gaffes" as something that is only of concern in that it could potentially hinder Biden's efforts to defeat Trump. Sometimes, press figures concede there may be a problem but, in the end, make nothing of it--the thought just comes, goes and is gone. Perhaps the most disturbing press reaction has involved attacking those who raise questions about Biden's cognitive abilities. That isn't just covering for Biden; that's actively trying to suppress discussion of the matter. This isn't a story of anecdotes about Biden fumbles though; there's an ongoing narrative in this, Biden's apparently significant cognitive decline. That would be a major recurring theme in any responsible press coverage of Biden's campaign, the thing that, if treated seriously, would overwhelm everything else. Something on which Democrats, Republicans, third-party supporters, liberals conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, even people completely indifferent to politics--everyone--can agree is that "President of the United States" isn't a job for a congenitally dishonest half-wit with a broken brain. Yet that ongoing narrative, looking at this as a serious matter, is completely absent from the corporate press. It hasn't appeared in a single major outlet.
On 24 February, only days before the South Carolina primary, Biden appeared at the Democratic party's First in the South Dinner and boldly declared
"My name is Joe Biden. I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate! Look me over. If you like what you see, help out. If not, vote for the other Biden! Give me a look tough."This is the sort of thing that could end a campaign, particularly coming after nearly a year of constant comments like that from Biden, but the press hasn't told the public that story and it didn't tell the public this one either. A Google search for the quote turns up articles in a wide range of noxious right-wing outlets--the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, Sean Hannity's site, the Federalist, Fox News, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc.--but the "mainstream" press mostly just sat on it. As usual.[1] Biden the "candidate for the United States Senate," went on to win the South Carolina primary on Saturday.
In the course of his victory speech, Biden was trying to promote the state's Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and said, "Folks, now we need to stand behind Jaime Harrison, the next President of the United--," then caught himself and fell back to "next senator." At the Democratic debate in Houston in September, Biden referred to his rival Sen. Bernie Sanders as "the president." In that same debate, he declared, "I'm the Vice President of the United States." Mike Pence is still laughing over that one.[2] In the November Democratic debate, Biden referred to Cory Booker as "the president, excuse me, the future president" before settling on "the senator."
At that September debate--5 months into the campaign--Biden forgot the names of both Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, then two of his major rivals. In October in South Carolina, Biden renamed rival Julian Castro:
"...even though that I’m the only campaign that I’m aware of--maybe, maybe Cisneros's campaign is doing it, I’m not sur--but, um, or Castro's campaign is doing it... The, um, fact is that we have reached out extensively into the African-- excuse me, into the Hispanic community and the Latino community over my entire career."Last Spring, Biden referred to British Prime Minister Theresa May as "Margaret Thatcher." Thatcher hasn't been the Prime Minister for 30 years and hadn't been alive for over six. In August, he was talking about how European leaders had spoken out against Donald Trump's comments that there were "very fine people" participating in a neo-Nazi parade in Virginia and named Thatcher as doing so.[3] In September, he referred to Donald Trump as "Donald Hump." The day after his South Carolina victory, he appeared on Fox News and, in an interview in which he mocked Donald Trump's assertion that he was senile, he referred to interviewer Chris Wallace as "Chuck," an apparent reference to Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. On 24 February, Biden was telling an audience at the College of Charleston in South Carolina about his role in helping negotiate the Paris Climate Agreement:
"One of the things I'm proudest of is getting passed, getting moved, get- getting control of the Paris Climate Accord. I'm the guy that came back after meeting with Deng Xiaoping and making the case that I believe China would join if we put pressure on them."The Paris Agreement was drafted in 2015; Deng Xiaoping retired as the Chinese head of state in 1992 and had been dead for nearly 20 years by the time of the Paris Agreement.[4] Biden has made Obama nostalgia the major selling-point of his campaign but in an appearance in August, he forgot even Obama's name.
At a Monday rally in Houston on the verge of Super Tuesday, Biden said, "Look, tomorrow's Super Thurs... Tuesday." He also began to quote the Declaration of Independence and forgot the words.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the, y'know, you know the thing."While the press ignored this, Twitter suspended progressive journalist Jordan Chariton's account for accurately quoting Biden's "Super Thursday" line, asserting that Chariton had violated Twitter's rules by posting "false information about voting or registering to vote." Chariton's suspension, which was lifted after a furor by Twitter users, didn't make any big headlines either.
Early August saw two mass shootings in the U.S.. A day after the 2nd one, Biden was speaking at one of his endless fundraisers--this one in San Diego--and referred to "the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan the day before." But the shootings happened in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Biden described how the survivors of the Parkland massacre had come to see him when he was Vice President but that shooting happened over a year after Biden had left office. At the Democrats' South Carolina debate last week, Biden attempted to attack Bernie Sanders on the question of gun control. This is what came out:
"One hundred and fifty million people have been killed since 2007, when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability. More than all the wars, including Vietnam, from that point on."That would be nearly half the population of the United States. No one corrected him.
In August, Biden recalled the 1970 Kent State massacre: "You had over 40 kids shot at Kent State on a beautiful lawn by the National Guard." Only 13 kids were shot at Kent State. At the Worker's Presidential Summit in Philadelphia in September, Biden said:
"You get a tax break for a racehorse, why in God's name couldn't we provide an $8,000 tax credit for everybody who has childcare costs? It would put 720 million women back in the workforce."There are only 165.92 million women in the United States and only 327 million people.
Biden opposes the Medicare For All healthcare plan and has, in fact, employed the same rhetoric against it as Donald Trump but during the September debate, Biden described "his" healthcare plan: "[T]he option I’m proposing is Medicare For All"
before catching and correcting himself and retreating to "Medicare For
Choice." This is how he described it:
"If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance-- from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. You don't have-- no pre-existing condition can stop you from buying in. You get covered, period."
Minutes
later, Julian Castro noted that his own plan doesn’t require a buy-in
and contrasted this with Biden's, at which point the former
Vice President insisted the Biden plan, contrary to his own clear words
only minutes earlier, didn't require a buy-in either. It led to a testy
exchange in which Castro challenged, "Are you forgetting what you said
two minutes ago?"
The allusion to Biden’s obviously impaired cognitive state brought gasps from the audience. In a gruesome twist, it also netted Castro a few days of negative press. Former Clintonite-right Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel immediately declared Castro "mean and vindictive" and his comments "disqualifying." Democratic contender Amy Klobuchar wagged her finger at Castro on CNN:
The allusion to Biden’s obviously impaired cognitive state brought gasps from the audience. In a gruesome twist, it also netted Castro a few days of negative press. Former Clintonite-right Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel immediately declared Castro "mean and vindictive" and his comments "disqualifying." Democratic contender Amy Klobuchar wagged her finger at Castro on CNN:
"I just thought this was not cool. I thought that was so personal and so unnecessary."
Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, also appearing on CNN, called Castro's comments "a low blow." It gets worse. Though Castro was entirely correct about what Biden had said, the press began insisting he'd been wrong. Politifact ran a story that confirmed Biden's plan was an "opt-in" plan, completely ignored the fact that Biden had repeatedly said people had to "buy in" to it (even while quoting Biden as doing so) and ruled Castro's comments "Mostly False." Along similar lines, USA Today said, "Castro Appears To Misrepresent Biden's Health Care Plan During Debate." The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin tweeted that "Castro was wrong AND nasty." The Post ran an analysis similar to that of Politifact wherein Amber Phillips noted that Biden had said his plan required a buy-in but trashed Castro anyway because at a different point in the debate, Biden had said people who qualified for his plan would be automatically enrolled in it.
If Phillips thought the fact that Biden had offered contradictory explanations of his own plan raised some legitimate questions or ever questioned the propriety of attacking Castro for getting Biden's plan wrong when Biden himself had misstated it, she didn't share it with her readers."Biden didn’t actually forget anything... Castro might take issue with the fact some people do have to buy in. (Biden said earlier that if you lose your job and need new insurance, you could buy in to this.) But he was incorrect that Biden forgot something about his own plan. It was Castro who forgot what Biden said."
Biden's cognitive abilities had become a whale in the room by this point. The message from the press treatment of Castro was, "Don't even talk about it. Or else."
In August, Biden recalled making a speech a few days earlier in Vermont, when he'd actually made the speech in question in Iowa. Ten days later, Biden was in Keene, New Hampshire and said, "I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?" In his speech in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, Biden said, "It is important that Iowa and Nevada have spoken," but it was New Hampshire that had just "spoken." The Nevada caucus was still several days away. Biden continued with, "But look, we need to hear from Nevada and South Carolina and Super Tuesday and beyond."
This is Biden from the November debate talking about violence against women:
"No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger... So we have to just change the culture, period, and keep punching at it and punching it and punching at it."That's not from a Saturday Night Live skit, though it did get some uncomfortable laughs. Biden didn't even seem to realize he'd said anything inappropriate.
At that same debate, Biden was asked how he would get intransigent Republicans to work with him and replied,
"[L]ook, the next President of the United States is going to have to do two things. Defeat Donald Trump, that’s number one."This echoed an answer Biden had given in the June debate, when Chuck Todd has asked the candidates what would be the first issue they pushed if elected; Biden replied, "the first thing I would do is make sure that we defeat Donald Trump." Presumably, Biden plans to win the presidency then, some time after the inauguration, drag Trump into some alley and administer this.
In a CNN interview in July, Biden offered some comments on Russian interference in elections:
"Look at what's happening with Putin. While he-- while Putin is trying to undo our elections, he is undoing elections in-- in Europe. Look at what's happened in Hungary; look what's happened in Poland; look what's happened to Moldova. Look what's happening. You think that would have happened under my watch or Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that but I promise you it wouldn't have and it didn't."Does it really need to be pointed out that any Russian interference that happened in the 2016 presidential race in the U.S.--the interference over which Clintonite-right figures like Biden spent years publicly obsessing--happened entirely under the Obama/Biden administration?
When speaking without a strict script, Biden veers from unfocused, inarticulate, contradictory and chronically dishonest to outright bizarre, ludicrous and almost entirely incomprehensible. Grabien put together a series of quick clips of Biden from the January debate that helps illustrate what a chore it can be to even listen to him. In December, the New York Times reported of Biden,
"He takes circuitous routes to the ends of sentences, if he finishes them at all. He sometimes says the opposite of what he means ('I would eliminate the capital gains tax--I would raise the capital gains tax' he said in this month’s debate). He has mixed up countries, cities and dates, embarked on off-message asides and sometimes he simply cuts himself off."The Times presents this as merely a "style" of speaking and as something that could hinder Biden's campaign, instead of really glaring signs of an obvious problem.[5] And it's quite a problem. Biden doesn't just make the occasional hash of things. He can--and regularly does--ramble on for extended periods without ever making any clear point about the subject on which he theoretically began to speak. Or about any other. For all of Biden's many preexisting faults, this is something that has only emerged during the presidential campaign. Watching video of him from only 6 years ago, when he used clear words to speak in complete sentences, offered complete thoughts in ordinary tones, makes for a remarkable contrast.[6]
Most experienced politicians know what to do when confronted with a skeptical but non-hostile voter. Be friendly, address their concerns as best you can, tell them you hope you can win their vote and wish them well. When, during the present presidential campaign, Biden meets such voters, he becomes standoffish, belligerent, dismissive, blowing off their concerns and telling them to vote for someone else, sometimes putting his hands on them in an aggressive manner. During a November appearance by Biden in South Carolina, a member of an immigrant support network asked Biden a question of suspending deportations of undocumented immigrants; Biden shot back, "Well, you should vote for Trump. You should vote for Trump." As a December event in Iowa, a voter questioned Biden's age and about the propriety of his son Hunter's work in Ukraine. Biden exploded. "You're a damn liar, man." Biden called the fellow old and fat and challenged him to, in succession, a push-up contest, a running contest and an IQ test. When video of the incident emerged, it managed to get some negative press. The Biden campaign later denied Biden had called the fellow "fat"--though it was clear from the video Biden did that very thing--and claimed he had said "facts" (he hadn't). That same month, Biden was asked by an environmental activist about one of his climate policy advisers, who has taken millions from the fossil fuel industry. Biden's response (grabbing the man's shoulders and getting in his face): "If you looked at my record and you still doubt about my commitment, then you should vote for somebody else." In Des Moines in January, Biden became angry with a man who had some questions about environmental policy; Biden poked his finger in the man's chest, grabbed the man by the jacket, told him "you have to go vote for someone else."
After the December "fat" confrontation, Biden adviser Symone Sanders tried to put a positive spin on it:
"If anybody's wondering if Joe Biden can take on Donald Trump and is ready for a fight, I'd point you to the video in Iowa."Yes, a thin-skinned candidate is definitely who should take on Trump, an opponent who will never mock or rib him. And Biden is so thoughtful, articulate and well-spoken, it's clear those who argue Trump would chop him up for dog-food on a debate stage are just a bunch of silly-billys.
Biden's efforts to ingratiate himself with black voters have taken cynicism to an all-new level, even for American politics, but like everything else, they've also raised serious questions about his cognitive abilities.
Biden staked his presidential campaign on a big win in South Carolina, where the population is disproportionately elderly, conservative and black. On 28 February, Biden told a crowd of supporters in the state that "I'm looking forward to appointing the first African-American woman to the United States Senate!" Presidents don't appoint senators though, and two black women have already served in the body anyway. At the November debate, Biden bragged about his black support. "I have more people supporting me in the black community that have vouched for me because they know who I am... The only blafrican-American [sic] woman who's ever been elected to the United States Senate." Kamala Harris, a black woman elected to the Senate who had, by then, been running against Biden for 7 months, who certainly hadn't endorsed him and who was, in fact, standing on the same stage as he, was amused.
At an October townhall event in South Carolina, Biden told a crowd of black students that he attended an historically black college.
"I got started out at an HBCU, Delaware State. Now I don’t want to hear anything negative about Delaware State here. They’re my folks."Biden never attended Delaware State.
On 11 February, he told another South Carolina crowd that in the 1970s, he "had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador" in apartheid South Africa while trying to get to see the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Five days later, Biden told another crowd,
"After [Mandela] got free and became president [of South Africa], he came to Washington and came to my office. He threw his arms around me and said, 'I want to say thank you.' I said, 'What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?' He said: 'You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.'"Every part of this story turned out to be a lie. Biden had never been arrested. Andrew Young, the then-Ambassador to South Africa, said it never happened. Soweto, where Biden claimed he was arrested, is nearly 900 miles from Robben Island, where Mandela was held. Biden had never mentioned any such arrest in any of his recollections of that trip. By the end of February, Biden had admitted it never happened but claimed he was referring to an incident in Lesotho in which
"They had me get off a plane--the Afrikaners got on in the short pants and their guns. Lead me off first and moved me in a direction totally different. I turned around and everybody, the entire black delegation, was going another way. I said, 'I'm not going to go in that door that says white only. I’m going with them.' They said, 'You're not, you can't move, you can't go with them.' And they kept me there until finally I decided that it was clear I wasn’t going to move."The Washington Post contacted Don Bonker, who had, at the time, been a congressman who was with Biden on the trip in question. Bonker says he "strongly supports" Biden's current presidential race but he also refuted this new claim, saying "We had no problem with airports at any of the countries we visited." Lesotho is an independent nation and wasn't an apartheid state. Even the Post's Clintonite-right "fact-checker" Glenn Kessler had to concede Biden's claims were "ridiculous."
A fact that was sent down the media Memory Hole decades ago was that, for many years, Biden falsely claimed to have been an activist involved in the civil rights movement.
"'When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,' Mr. Biden thundered, testing his presidential message in February 1987 before a New Hampshire audience. 'I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.'This blew up in his face during his first presidential campaign that year, when it was revealed he'd been plagiarizing speeches for years, lifting dramatic biographical details from the lives of others and presenting them as his own, lying about his poor, sometimes scandalous academic record and he admitted he'd had no involvement at all in civil rights.
"More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood--and kept telling the story anyway."
Biden's first campaign ended in scandal over these issues. Fast-forward to 2014: Biden gives a speech to a King Day breakfast for the National Action Network and revives his old lies, presenting himself as a civil rights activist again, telling tales he'd never told in his life:"''During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement,' he said. But at another point he said, 'I was not an activist,' adding:"'I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Del. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.'"
"I got involved in desegregating movie theaters and helping, you may remember, Reverend Moyer in Delaware and Herman Holloway, organized voter registration drives--coming out of Black churches on Sunday--figuring how we were going to move."Fast-forward again to December 2019: Biden is embroiled in a primary battle against Bernie Sanders, who actually did participate in the civil rights struggle. This was probably regarded as problematic, particularly given the fact that Biden spent much of the 1970s as a segregationist, a fact his rival Kamala Harris publicly noted in July, and his decades pushing for right-wing "tough on crime" policies that devastated communities of color. Not a good look for someone trying to enlist communities of color to support his candidacy. Whatever the thinking, Biden revived this nonsense, claiming he'd become a part of the civil rights movement when he was 17 and telling tales of having gotten up for early Mass then going to a black church to discuss what kind of anti-segregation actions he and his companions were going to undertake. The black church in which he says this took place has changed with different tellings and all of the other details Biden has offered are wrong. Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King deserves the credit for exposing this and resurrecting Biden's history of false claims in this matter, which, King documents, go back to at least 1975. His article, "2 Truths & 31 Lies Joe Biden Has Told About His Work in the Civil Rights Movement" is, one must concede, a bit sloppily written but is full of details, videos, old press clippings documenting this appalling story, which should have caused a major scandal and killed Biden's campaign in its tracks. Instead, the press sat on it. It was barely reported at all.
How much of this sordid faux-history can one attribute to Biden's various shortcomings? The decade-plus of lies Biden told about being involved in the civil rights movement are products of both his penchant for manufacturing dramatic narratives in which he is the hero and his idiocy but eventually, in 1987, he fessed up and walked away from the false narrative. He stayed away from it for decades. Then, during the present campaign, he returns to and expands upon it. Idiocy, or a sign of his mental decline?
When considering Biden for the presidency, does it really matter which of these three traits are at work here and in everything else I've just outlined and to what degrees? Are any of them desirable in a president? Is it wise to elect someone to be President of the United States who so prominently displays all three? Because if it is, the current occupant of the White House has that on his side too.
Those around Biden understand these problems. From the beginning, they've mostly kept him off the campaign trail. The lack of enthusiasm for his campaign killed his grassroots fundraising efforts months ago. From early on, his campaign has been dependent on a relative handful of big-money donors and Biden was holding more fundraisers than campaign events. In October, as his campaign funds dwindled, Biden, who had been publicly discouraging assistance from super PACs in an effort to attract some of those populist Bernie vibes, dropped even that show of opposition. A string of Biden "gaffes" in August that managed to get some coverage sharpened fears among his allies that these, if ever given the proper attention by the press, could develop into a narrative about his cognitive state. Their solution wasn't to find a better candidate who didn't raise those concerns but to cynically suggest further limiting Biden's campaigning.
The corporate press has helped. The phenomenon outlined here offers a preview of any general election campaign featuring Biden. An inarticulate Biden says ridiculous, contradictory, insane, mind-melting things, much of major media ignores it or exercises comically undue restraint in reporting it, while overt rightist and far-right publications absolutely marinate in it. Except during a general election, Trump, the Republicans and their supporters wouldn't allow this to be swept under the rug. It is, in fact, reasonable to assume they'll do everything they can to make sure every news cycle is dominated by some new brain-breaking thing Biden has said. The past 11 months have made clear that Biden will provide a steady supply.[7] Consider this: Biden is the only Democratic candidate who, after months of this, could eventually convince millions of reasonable people who outright despise Trump and wouldn't ordinarily even think of voting for him that Trump is actually the safe, responsible choice.
South Carolina was 4 contests into Joe Biden's third presidential run over a 32-year period but it was the first time he'd won a single state (and he was 3 contests into the current race before he'd ever won a single delegate). In none of his previous efforts was he brought down by any opponent; in both, he buried himself. Prior to South Carolina, it looked as if Biden was on his way out, falling before progressive rival Bernie Sanders. He took South Carolina because while the press sits on much of what has been covered here--and so, so much more--it despises Sanders and tried to bury him. While Sanders was winning contests, his lack of "electability" and the idea that he would cost Democrats the congress were presented, hour after hour across national media outlets, as givens. Major media figures felt entirely comfortable repeatedly comparing the Jewish candidate to the rise of Nazism. Then, with no sense of self-awareness, they also compared him to plagues, disasters, etc. A major theme was to portray Sanders as an apologist for Marxist dictatorships, particularly the former Castro regime in Cuba. It was suggested that if Sanders the socialist won, there may be executions of dissidents in New York's Central Park. And so on. This endless campaign of defamation was the dominant news media narrative for three weeks, then, once this helped Biden to victory in South Carolina,[8] the press held a triumph and treated the former Vice President as the Comeback Kid and conquering hero for 3 days. By one estimate, Biden, within that time, was given $71,992,629 in almost entirely positive media coverage.[9] Throw in local media in the Super Tuesday markets and this goes over $100 million.[10] Until his South Carolina win, Biden hadn't campaigned in a single Super Tuesday state for over a month. When he won big on Super Tuesday, MSNBC's Brian Williams, again without any self-awareness, marveled that Biden could do so well in so many states in which he didn't even have a campaign office.[11]
Multinational media corporations with an ideological animosity toward progressives are once again working to foist on the public another weak, loser candidate, in this case one whose candidacy would be regarded in any sane media environment as, at best, a tragic farce. The likely reelection of Trump if they succeed isn't remotely the biggest challenge posed to liberal democracy by the constant efforts by a handful of powerful companies to manipulate public opinion but so much of the press not only refusing to inform the public about Biden but throwing its weight behind such a candidacy represents a fundamental breakdown of journalism.
--j.
---
[1] Reuters circulated the video of the incident. Newsweek reported it but attempted a bizarre defense of Biden, saying some journalists and Biden supporters had argued that his remark "has been taken out of context. They say he is simply offering a rhetorical comparison to voters--between his decades as a U.S. senator versus the presidential candidate he is today."
Yeah, it's that bad.
[2] In Iowa in November, Biden said a series of green initiatives are "what the president and I" are proposing, as if he thought he was still in office.
[3] At the same event at which Biden did this the second time, he talked about using biofuels to power "steamships" and proclaimed "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids!"
[4] At a campaign event in October, Biden was apparently trying to reference the Paris Climate Agreement when he said:
"I'm going to make sure we rejoin the Paris Peace Accord on day one and I’m going to announce within the first 100 days, those 173 nations are going to come and meet in Washington, D.C. to up the ante."The Paris Peace Accord was the agreement that ended the Vietnam War in 1973.
[5] The Times also made an error regarding the Biden comment it quoted; it happened at the October debate, not in December. Biden said,
"I would eliminate the capital gains tax that-- I would raise the capital gains tax to the highest rate of 39.5%... Why in God’s name should someone who’s clipping coupons in the stock market make… in fact, pay a lower tax rate than someone who, in fact, is… like I said, a school teacher and a firefighter?"Those high-powered Wall Street traders are real coupon-clippers, aren't they?
[6] For a really sharp contrast, watch any one of Biden's dreary debate performances of this cycle and compare them to Biden's 2012 debate with then-Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, which is available on Youtube.
[7] While Sanders has a large, active, enthusiastic movement behind him, Biden has nothing of the sort. Nominating him would alienate the activist base of the party that has worked for years to elect a progressive and while Trump and the Republicans would be promoting every Biden brain-breaker, they'd also be forcing into public light Biden's long, conservative record, which the press has also mostly swept under the rug during the primaries. Trump can actually run to Biden's left on issues like trade, just as he did with Clinton, but the real damage done by forcing disclosure of Biden's anti-progressive history is to further suppress the vote among an already-demoralized progressive base.
[8] Biden held a huge lead in South Carolina for months but prior to the worst of this slander, Sanders had been catching him. Concurrent with the attacks on Sanders in the week leading into the vote, Biden experienced a massive burst of support. By 22 February, Sanders' polling average in the state sat at 21% vs. Biden at 23.3%. Between then and 29 February, Sanders flat-lined and Biden skyrocketed to 39.7%.
[9] The Super Tuesday exit-polling showed what has become a trend. "Late deciders"--low-information voters who are most susceptible to these media narratives--broke heavily for Biden. The Washington Post reports that
"Late deciders heavily backed Biden, according to exit poll results, an indication of how much he was boosted by his resounding South Carolina victory and late endorsements by Klobuchar and Buttigieg."Exit polls showed Biden won roughly 6 in 10 primary voters who decided in the last few days in Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama, and won about half of this group in Maine, Texas and Minnesota. Sanders won no more than 3 in 10 late deciders in any state except his home state of Vermont, where Sanders and Biden ran about even."
[10] To put that $100 million+ in perspective, that's more, in only 3 days, than the combination of all super PACs have spent in the entire 2020 cycle to date:
[11] In most of the commentary on this, it's assumed that Biden's lack of campaign appearances is because of a lack of money but it's also part of the same effort to hide Biden from the public that we've seen all along. Even in the early stages of the campaign when he had money, he'd never done many campaign appearances, never many interviews; in the debates so far, he's been just one candidate on a crowded stage and only has to speak for, cumulatively, a few minutes. He's kept away from the public because of how badly he comes off when he's put before it. His campaign is banking on his being able to skate through the primaries on name-recognition/Obama nostalgia and just want to keep him from torpedoing himself. His Super Tuesday victories will bring in a fresh wave of money from well-heeled donors but his campaign schedule is likely to remain as nearly non-existent as possible.
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ADDENDUM
Some who, on social media, comment on Biden's cognitive problems have called them "dementia" or have suggested Alzheimer's or some other disorder may be in play. I'm not qualified to render any such diagnosis and neither are most of them. In my view, they do their concerns an unnecessary disservice by playing amateur physician. Biden's problems are quite obvious to anyone who listens to him and will harm him without regard for what what medicine may call them.
At the same time, Biden's supporters have sometimes tried to deflect concerns over this matter by labeling those who raise them "ableist," based on the fact that when young, Biden had a stuttering problem. But a stutter doesn't cause his regular habit of crafting complex but entirely false narratives, it doesn't give him his thin skin or generate his hostile attitude toward skeptical voters, it isn't the culprit behind his inability to properly recall even very recent events or to complete sentences or not to contradict himself within the same sentence. It isn't what makes him go off on tangents unrelated to the subject he's supposed to be discussing until that subject is long lost. It doesn't make his English so often seem like a badly-learned second language. It can't make him forget Obama's name. It doesn't explain anything covered here. And in any event, stuttering hasn't been an issue for Biden since long before most people reading these words today were alive. Biden himself has specifically denied any of this is because of a stutter.
Finally, some have suggested compassion for Biden and a sense of moral outrage at elements of the press and Democratic Establishment for exploiting him, an obviously unsuitable candidate for the presidency, to try to defeat a progressive challenge. The moral outrage is certainly appropriate but while I'd never want to discourage compassion--something of which the world could use a lot more--I would argue there really isn't any grounds for feeling bad for Biden. He isn't a victim here. He's a deplorable person who, for personal advancement and the checks from his well-heeled donors, has devoted his life to pushing policies that harmed his fellow Americans. His present campaign is par for the course.
