The headlines blared it out to the world. They were the same whether the news source was liberal or conservative. Joe Biden, they screamed, is a doddering old fool. Take it from a Mr. Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who filed the report exonerating Biden from wrong doing regarding retained classified materials. He’s not bad, the report said, just demented. This is nothing new to today’s press. They somehow feel impelled to constantly undermine Biden’s accomplishments while pointing out his imagined detriments. Usually both in the same headline. I guess it’s good for business.
Hur should be forced to issue a retraction and an apology and then be canned. Not that this would help. The damage has been done.
Joe doesn’t help matters by being soft spoken and manifesting vestiges of his childhood speech impediment. That he repeats the same old stories endlessly makes him look like an old coot whose muddled mind lives in the past. His facial expressions and body language do not give him a vigorous appearance.
Joe has a serious image problem that, in this image obsessed society, could doom his candidacy. I doubt there is anything he can do to change it.
Voters no longer pay attention to what politicians do or accomplish. Their impressions and conclusions are ruled by superficial traits. Thanks to social media, everyone is engaged in creating a false persona. Who and what they really are escapes notice. Substance cannot hold a candle to image.
Could Biden’s unjustly maligned image deal his candidacy a death blow? If so, should he announce he is not going to run for a second term? Lyndon Johnson did it when his image, thanks to the Viet Nam war, had been too much compromised.
If he were to drop out, there are several younger, charismatic Democrats he could endorse. (Kamala Harris, faced with her own image problem, is not one of them.)
I like Joe. Having, unlike most people, paid attention to real events, I know he has done a great job. I would vote again for him in a heartbeat. But the risk of giving Trump the chance to come back into power may be too great. Egged on by the insistence of the press to continue drawing false equivalences between him and Trump, voters may well overlook all of Trump’s faults while focusing on a conjured up image of Biden as non compos mentis.
The stakes are enormous. If this should result in a criminal dictator getting back into the White House, America as we know it, will cease to exist. The entire balance of power in the world would tilt eastward toward totalitarian regimes.
What would you tell Joe to do if he were to ask you? “Hang in there?” Or “take your bows and pack it in?” Whatever he does, when history comes around to chronicling his true accomplishments, his image will be restored to the positive one he deserves. In the meantime we will all be on tenterhooks as the crazy course of this election year unfolds.
An Author's Inner Mind 