Joe Biden, opulently funded as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is splurging $12 million on TV ads. One focuses on his relationship with President Barack Obama. It takes its audio from Obama’s 2017 speech in giving his veep the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s a smart, folksy ad that depicts an ordinary Joe who is yet also remarkable, and it finishes with Obama describing Biden as a “loyal and humble servant,” adding, “The best part is, he’s nowhere close to finished.”
Much meaning is packed into this. The bit about Biden being nowhere near finished is meant to show that Obama doesn’t believe his onetime sidekick has lost the plot, is simply past it. That seems doubtful. Biden, 77, is suddenly winning, but he is still the meandering chucklehead he was when he seemed to be sinking without trace. His party disinterred him and is carrying him across the finish line.
That’s not leading. If Obama really thought Biden was right for the presidency, he’d endorse him. Instead, Obama has done everything short of explicit repudiation to discourage him. That’s why the ad was obliged to use three-year-old tape from a kumbaya moment rather than a simple recent declaration. There isn’t one.
The reference to Biden as loyal and humble is laser-targeted on black voters. It draws attention to the reason for Biden’s appeal as explained by Laurie Goff, a black woman who recently wrote, “This old rich white man played second fiddle to a black man. … He took his cues from a black man who had more power than him … He was willing and proud to be his wing man. … respected him, he loved and trusted him.” Having Obama describe his white subordinate as “loyal and humble” goes to the adamantine core of Biden’s minority support, which no pandering by his rivals could scratch.
So far, so effective.
But another aspect of the ad is its nostalgia, and it should trouble Democrats. It harkens back many years to when Biden wasn’t the diminished figure we see before us today. There he is on the evening train home from Capitol Hill to be with his children in Delaware. There he is again, later but still many years ago, with his late son, Beau. These scenes are shown in black and white stills, adding, like sepia prints, the flavor of a kinder, gentler, epoch. The idea is to evoke a less ugly time before President Trump and to persuade voters they can return there if only they elect Biden.
The problem with bygone eras, however, is that they are bygone. There is no going back. Biden is avowedly yesterday’s man; his rhetoric is all about (dubious) past achievements. “I was the one who … etc., etc.” If he has spoken one accurate debate line, it was, “My time is up.”
By contrast, if there’s one incontestable fact about Trump, it’s that he stays in the present. Like Edna Mode, he wants nothing to distract from the now. This is often a fault. Whereas the Biden campaign looks backward with misty-eyed reverence, the president, despite a campaign slogan about returning America to its past greatness, treats the ways of the past with disdain. Trump doesn’t think far ahead, either, often not even past the next set of poll data.
The result, assuredly, is that Trump is often just as incoherent as Biden. And it also means he is gratingly preoccupied with how an issue makes him look rather than with its substance. The COVID-19 plague is an obvious case in point. But his constant presence in the present, his mastery of social media, his apparently effortless ability to hog attention — all give him an immediacy and energy next to which Biden shrivels and shrinks. Trump’s relentless occupation of the here and now, rather than of a golden yesterday, confers on him a kind of relevance, even when he is missing the point. It doesn’t come from his office. He had it when he was a candidate whom traditional metrics deemed unelectable.
Biden could win. He is, for example, far more popular with Rust Belt white men than Hillary Clinton was. So, he could flip those states back from Trump. But this coming November is setting up as an extraordinary contest between a president fixated on today and a challenger dwelling on the past. Trump carries his party or, as critics contend, beats it up and sweeps it before him. Biden is propped up by his party, with its timely endorsements, its changing rules, and its determination to pretend that the candidate’s mental decline is the dishonest invention of dastardly Republicans rather than a fact obvious to anyone not asleep for the past year.
