President Joe Biden challenged Donald Trump to a debate via social media video: remember this?
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“Well, make my day, pal.”
Biden performed so badly at that debate that he’s been forced out of the race. It’s interesting to read pieces about Biden before the debate, like this one from the New York Times. Jason Farago certainly had a lot to say about Biden two days before:
“… or Alec Guinness’s Jedi. Wise, perhaps wily. Full of life, if maybe long-winded.”
Farago wrote:
“Watch me,” President Biden likes to say when he’s asked — he’s asked a lot, these days — whether he is too old to serve a second term. He is getting his wish.
For the first three years of his administration, in contrast to the last president’s chaotic omnipresence, Mr. Biden kept himself scarce. Now his smallest appearance brings with it a thousand remote diagnoses from armchair gerontologists. A major speech, like his State of the Union address in March, is assessed not for its policy but its fluidity as spoken-word performance. A minor gaffe, like bungling a single sentence at a Philadelphia rally in April, is dissected as possible evidence of decline.
He is facing an image problem that time exacts on everyone. Now the first presidential debate of 2024 is happening months earlier than usual, in part because the Biden campaign wants to overcome a mounting concern that the president, at 81, is not up to four additional years of service. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre” — or so Philip Roth’s “Everyman” howled in 2006. Electorally, this year, it might be both.
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He got his wish all right.
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Now Biden disappeared to his Delaware beach house for so long that people started asking for proof of life.
Farago added, “But the perception of his age has become desperately entangled with cultural connotations of elderliness, formed over centuries, handed down to us through religion and literature and art.” No, it was handed down to us through “cheap fakes.”
It’s good to remember how the media were selling Biden as the very best version of Biden there’d ever been and questioning his mental acuity was not allowed.
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