Can We Talk About Joe Biden? I Think We Need To Talk About Joe Biden

I Think It's Important

I want to tell you two things. The first one is embarrassing. The second one is spookily symbolic. Then I’ll go on for a bit, and after that I need you to help me make a decision.

The Embarrassing Thing

About this time last year I was in the grips of Dark Brandon fever. You remember that, right? Sort of? Ah those glorious days of Q1 2024. Whenever I think of them my internal monologue takes on a wistful french accent, no? We were so young. So innocent. We believed in Joe Biden. We believed he could win a second term. Perhaps easily? Because we had an itchy faith, but faith nonetheless, that our opted-out, not-following-the-news fellow Americans were basically if lazily on our side, and we were all done with Him. Job growth was strong. Inflation was slowly deflating. Quiet competence was good. Student loan forgiveness was admirable. The Gaza thing would be winding down any day now. Plus, Trump was sure to be on trial all summer, and likely to be convicted of many crimes before the election, and back then it was still widely believed that crimes were bad. Life was good. Hopium was in the water, like fluoride used to be.

But (end French accent, begin Werner Herzog voice) also we were terribly afraid; terribly, paralyzingly afraid in a way that froze the possibility centers in our brains, and this was even before Project 2025 had dropped. He was still out there, the unrepentant, unrepentable Hypnotoad of the 21st century, lurking in and at one with the darkness.

And (normal voice) because we couldn’t do jack shit about this cognitive dissonance we wrapped ourselves in lolz. Someone created a meme where Joe Biden was shooting lasers out his eyes. I think it was a troll, but mostly we were trying to troll the abyss within, but whatever, it was hilarious: joie d’vivre d’pixels, an ironic somersault of fuck-yeah, a talisman of all dorkiness that could and would protect America.

I upvoted every Dark Brandon post I could find. I smirked when my favorite podcasters mentioned it. I joined a Dark Brandon Discord and I don’t even know what Discord is. I bought Dark Brandon lawn signs (several of which would be stolen when I put them out, causing me to buy yet more.) And most importantly for this story, I got myself a Dark Brandon coffee mug.

The Spookily Symbolic Thing

The mug fell and broke.

The exact circumstances I do not know, but I came home one afternoon in the early summer, and laser-eye’d-Joe was on the kitchen counter, its handle beside it in three pieces. My wife said that she’d opened the cupboard and he’d just fallen out.I had enjoyed being flamboyant with my Dark Brandon mug. When I would sip from it during Zoom meetings, I consciously used my left hand so that Joe’s face would look outwards, into the camera and directly at my colleagues who were all on the same page as me politically, but not as cool about it as I was. But while I wasn’t hurting for coffee receptacles, I was now hurting, just a little: At about that time I became conscious of a persistent pinprick in my brain made slightly worse because I couldn’t quite find where, what or why it was. The mug had fallen. The sacred image of Biden had broken (but not shattered; still very repairable). There was a disturbance in the mojo.

And this was all before June 27th. I will never forget that debate, despite the fact that I did not watch it.

When I put the broken pieces of the mug up on the dining room shelf, there was still a lot of hope around . My wife and I agreed we’d fix it later. Maybe we’d even do that Japanese thing we saw on TikTok where people lovingly, almost spiritually, glued broken ceramics back together with faux-gold adhesive. That would make a good point, I thought, not being entirely sure what the point was. But then the rest of the year happened, assassination attempts, brat summers, cats and dogs, and the pieces of Dark Brandon remain exactly where we left them, oft-seen but untouched.

A Third Thing That Probably Impacts Everything, But Which Happened More-Or-Less As I Was Typing These Words And I Did Not Have The Time To Artfully Weave Into the Narrative Structure

Joe Biden, 82, announced that he has Stage 4 prostate cancer. It has sunk to his bones.

In what may or may not be a coincidence, the announcement came just a day or two after the media pre-launch of Jake Tapper’s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Intentionally or otherwise, we find ourselves in the stands of a narrative rodeo, and it’s not clear which version of previous events is going to get stomped and which is going to win whatever one wins at a rodeo (a cow?). And because of the cancer, it seems pressing that we figure it all out pronto.

But the Actual Question Is…

…do I glue the Dark Brandon mug back together? Or do I throw it in the trash?

The answer depends entirely on what we think of Joe Biden now, a year after his run for a second-term began to lose altitude and the consequences of it all have become dazzlingly, sickeningly clear? And is there anything worth taking from The Joe Biden Experience, anything that can help us move forward?

So….What Do We Think About Joe Biden?

I’ll be honest, I’ve been trying to forget him.

And until this last week it hasn’t really been that hard. The daily, omni-oxygen sucking Trumpocalypse hasn’t really left much bandwidth left for contemplation of the past. And that’s the thing. I tripped over that fact as I was trying to find my way forward here, but now that I look at it, it might just be the most important thing:

Joe Biden is the past.

He has occurred. But, even before the tumor jumped out from behind the curtain we all knew that Joe Biden would not recur.

We all knew this. I knew this and I was the biggest Joe-stan there was and even I felt that at best he was going to be a really solid transition to something newer and better, something I couldn’t quite see. To really realize how much of a placeholder Joe was, even at the moment of his greatest triumph in 2020, we just have to look at how totally weird it was that he was there in the first place.

He was cold product when he became Vice President in 2008. That’s why Obama picked him: He was the sober, senior face of government experience, i.e. the very definition of a bland DC grandpa. The only cup of charm he had to set him apart from Chris Coons or Martin Heinrich or Ed Markey was his geezery wont of blurting out things that you could tell he meant to sound Malcom Gladwell-edgy but actually just sounded daffy. Remember when he wanted to split Iraq into three countries? By late 2014ish, the only reason most people could remember him was that he was a recurring gag on Parks & Rec, where comically sincere civic-striver Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) was a Joe Biden fangirl. It was funny of course, and very Lesely Knope, for her to idolize Biden because no one idolized Joe Biden. Ever. He was a towering figure in Delaware, the smallest place anyone can be a towering figure. I don’t even think buildings can be taller than three-stories there.

The funny thing about now is that we are oppressed and exhausted by a Republican party, and a dim plurality of voters, who are violently obsessed with the past. As a slogan, “Make America Great Again” works on a dizzying number of levels but its real power is that it's so simple: It says that the way to make America better is to make it like it was in the past. Exactly which past we’re supposed to be aiming for is left purposefully vague: My guess that they want 1951-1961. Trump has recently alluded to 1913 as peak America, though the last person you want to ask about what Donald Trump actually means is Donald Trump. Either way, I’m horrified and nauseated by it. All of it. Whenever, whatever.

But you know what? I want to go back to the past too. And so do a lot of us normal people. But we want the politics time machine to take us back to the later-age of Obama. Set the dial for sometime between 2011 and the day of the golden escalator, June 16, 2015. I did not pay a lot of attention to politics back then, not nearly as much as I do now, not because I was checked-out of civic responsibility but because there just didn’t seem that much to pay attention to. I think we were worried about the budget deficit back then. The government might have shut down once or twice. Paul Ryan was a person who people talked about. I think he was an accountant of some kind. A lot of people were either righteous or upset about gay marriage, but we all knew which way that was going and we were just floating along with the social current. It was taking longer to arrive at the future than I would have hoped, but that’s how life is: You just wait.

I miss a lot about the before-times, but I miss that most of all: The confidence that you get from familiar things, familiar problems, familiar solutions, familiar patterns. Hope and hopelessness both existed, but they came in known shapes and moved in known ways.

I missed this especially in the coughing, quivering, pacing-back-and-forth winter of 2020, when not even toilet paper made sense anymore and registered Democrats were trying to figure out who they wanted to run against Donald Trump. What I wanted more than anything was someone who was normal, someone who could make America familiar again. And in this moment, in my sight, Joe Biden stepped into the phone booth and Superman stepped out, wearing aviator sunglasses and holding an ice cream cone.

Everything that made him laughably irrelevant and dusty before made him powerful now. He seemed to get along with everyone. Good. He was a realistic, incremental-change kind of guy who knew how to legislate. Great. The feeling I had, and the feeling that I think Joe had, and the whole promise of his campaign really was that we had merely blown past our exit in History and if America could just get off at the 2020 exit and double back we’d be more or less okay. More than anyone, I thought, Joe Biden could deliver on “okay.”

There were other options of course.

Bernie Sanders for one. I liked Bernie Sanders for many reasons. But Bernie would have been something new: a mold breakingly leftist president, and also an ancient Jewish president, who had a heart-attack in the middle of the campaign; a candidate who makes Larry David look young and open-minded. And new is scary.

In Bernie’s case, new was scary because of the changes he promised to bring. I could deal with that uncertainty. But what was scarier was the thought that that legions of convincible, Trump-exhausted voters out there would find his new ideas slightly scarier than I did, and thus he’d probably lose. Samesies with Pete Butteigeig. Great guy. Super intelligent, young and forward looking. Loved Pete. But a gay President would be something very new. And for something that new to happen I figured that the whole coalition needed to turn their keys at the same time. But elderly black church ladies in Atlanta and Detroit might not do that, and if they didn’t vote, then we all end up back in the pit.

As it turned out the elderly black church ladies in South Carolina made their preferences known. So it was Joe. That he pulled it out seemed like divine intervention. That the contentious primary ended after South Carolina, with Pete and Amy Klobuchar and Beto (ah, Beto) endorsing within hours gave to me an also-embarrassing-to-admit but very real faith in the Democratic string-pullers who must have pulled those particular strings, at that particular post-South Carolina momen, to get the fractured field to coalesce around Joe. Ironically I would feel the same familiar blooming trust in dull-but-shady septuagenarians just a little over four years later when after all the seemingly pointless cringing and posting into the void, someone finally said something to Joe Biden that made him step aside. I honestly don’t even know who or what I was believing in at either point, but it felt so good to believe.

Everything I knew about Biden prior to the 2020 election I have already written above. But everything I learned about him during that campaign made me like him more. Mostly this. I watched it over and over and over again. (I can’t bear to do so anymore.) In the past Joe’s simple empathy and humanity would have been unremarkable, little more than table stakes. But in 2020 what used to be hokey was catnip for normies.

Best of all, Joe won. By less than he should have. And the post-election process turned out to be shockingly iffy. Maybe I should have been more worried about that. Maybe we all should have been. But at that point we’d been worried for four years and if I couldn’t let go when He was finally gone-ish, then what was the point of anything? It had been bumpy getting there, but the past was back.

And it was great. For me and pretty much everyone I knew. Inflation was up, but I was far from struggling. Important issues were addressed in slow, infuriating ways: But the news was about Joe Manchin being a pain in the ass, not white supremacists taking actual dumps on legislation. Laws were passed, laws that set the country on a course to deal with climate change. We had a bipartisan commission investigating January 6th, minor shitbags were pleading guilty. Afghanistan was over and we were helping Russia kick its own ass in Ukraine, even if our guns arrived hemmingly and hawingly. This was good. Weren’t most of us on the same page about that? The predicted Red Tsunami of 2022 underwhelmed everyone. Fox was crying about the border, that particular boy had been crying about tamale-eating wolves so long I barely even heard them anymore.

We had done it.

Except that we hadn’t.

It turns out that you can’t actually ever bring the past back, because no matter how much past you stuff in the present, the future is still right there waiting for you, pressing its face against the glass and licking its teeth.

Ah Fuck

In the year of our Lord 2024, neither I, nor anyone in power, nor anyone else in the United States was actually living in the past. What people who believed (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) that Joe Biden should get a second-term were actually doing was performing the past.

We were thinking in ways we had traditionally thunk, saying things we had traditionally said, looking at maps and numbers we had traditionally looked at and believing things we had traditionally believed all so that we could, as we traditionally had, feel safe and ordered.

Which would have worked out great except that the number of people who needed to feel safe and ordered in America that year added up to just short of 270 electoral votes.

Zillionaire, golf-obsessed nihilists had been poking holes in our body politic for a very long time and we had never stopped the bleeding. At the same time all these gloriously past-y things were happening, inequality was growing, bigoted paranoias was spreading, trust was evaporating and when you tried to forget about all that by just going for breakfast at McDonald’s suddenly it was $30, which wasn’t going to break me but geez-us.

And yet at every point from 2022 onwards, supporting, defending and pushing for Joe Biden was the only logical thing for a normal person to do. Many have said that if Joe had declined to run around the end of 2022, and a healthy primary election had produced a new Democratic nominee for 2024, the party would have done better than it did. This is obviously correct.

(For a lot of reasons I think, but one of the most persuasive is that if it had happened, everyone would have spent all of 2023 thinking “Ooooh, I wonder who Democrats will nominate?”, versus what we actually spent that time thinking, which was, more-or-less, “donaldtrumpdonaldtrumpdonaldtrumpdonaldtrumpdonaldtrump”.)

But that course of action was just-as-obviously impossible. Because for that to happen, hundreds of very powerful people and tens of millions of normal people on whom their power depended would have had to quickly and simultaneously walk away from the desire for calm, sane, normie progress they knew and craved, that they had worked for years to achieve, and had finally gotten. Facing the incipient chaos of Trump II, they / we would have had to just - for a reason that was not so apparent then - decide that we’d like some more chaos please. Yeah, go right ahead and give us an 18-way primary .

That everyone did simultaneously jump ship, and onto the S.S. Harris, a year later when our sense of crisis got too hot to ignore is a good and healthy sign for us normal people. Republicans cannot do this anymore than they can fly. But it also makes clear that we would never have done this without a sense of crisis, which didn’t exist earlier.

I’m guessing that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s buzzy new book delivers salacious (“salacious” in the Ben Gay / Matlock sense of the word) new evidence of the former president’s potentially timeline altering decline. I have to guess that because I didn’t, and won’t, read the book. I contemplated asking ChatGPT for the key points and anecdotes so I could relate them to you, but even that would be a waste of time. We already know the thing: In 2022 and 23, there were signs that Joe Biden was struggling to keep up. He looked and acted old. There were real questions about his ability to function at a presidential level. Joe and his aides ignored those questions entirely.

Joe should have had the grace to face the questions and step aside. Probably the book makes this sound like some unique, unmissable King Lear-level tragedy, and the outcome certainly was, but it’s also the most boring thing ever: An old man was acting like a stubborn old man. Crazy, right?

(Funny how that works: That particular realities seem endlessly profound and dramatic, while the general truths that cause them are hardly worth talking about. Like if someone told you that your two neighbors were having an affair, and were about to ruin their lives with it, you would gossip about that relentlessly. For years even. But if someone told you that human beings - including your neighbors - are likely to do horny and shortsighted things, which of course you’ve already known since forever, you’d be like “yuh huh” without even looking up from your phone.)

Joe’s lieutenants should have had the courage to tell the world what they saw, and try to force the sort of crisis that took place in summer 2024 to happen a year earlier. But all those very smart people with lots of information and power were doing exactly the same thing that I was: They weren’t thinking about making 2024 as positive as it could possibly be. They were white-knuckling it, trying to keep 2023 as much like 2013 as they could for as long as they possibly could.

Lenin said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen. Truth. Also true: In the ambiguous place where time and hope flow together, you never really know what’s what or when’s when. It’s hard to say how long the past can last if you want it to. If you like what happened yesterday, and that same thing is happening today, why can’t it keep going? Flick away your problems like mosquitoes and linger at the lake: Summer can go on.

Until It Can’t

One way I think about it now is that on November 6, 2024 the nostalgia of fools, bigots and the confused was still running white hot, but the nostalgia of basically normal people (both those who vote regularly, and those who shrugged-out of the election) had melted away. The Age of Comparative Decency and Predictability we had up until 2016 was no longer credible. That past has passed.

And I find myself…strangely relieved. “Unburdened by what has been,” was how someone once put it.

Joe Biden was just what we all needed in 2020. In a lot of ways that are important he was a surprisingly good chief executive. He was the most moral president of my lifetime. Even if he was reduced to a motionless head in a cryogenic jar, we’d all be much better off with him as president than we are right now.

When it came to the most consequential decision of his administration, Joe fucked up. The people he trusted fucked up. Neither he nor they understood the decision that was in front of them, which might be part of the same omnibus fuck-up or an entirely independent fuck-up, depending on how you look at it. They held onto the past too long. I could continue to wrestle with what this all means for another 10,000 words easy. But here’s the beautiful, glorious, shining amazing thing:

I don’t have to. And neither do you.

We’ve finally let go of the past.

Technically it might be more accurate to say that the past was violently ripped from our lap and forcefully ejected through the windshield, out of the vehicle and into a concrete abutment before falling into a ditch during the high-speed democratic crash that was 2024, but whatever. It’s gone. And no one’s even looking for it.

If you don’t spend much time dwelling on the naval architects who designed the Titanic, or the decisions made by the management of the New York Jets, then you don’t need to think anything much about Joe Biden, other than to pray for his health. What happened happened. And now that the past-and-familiar is out of our systems, hopefully we can see clearly that what normal people need to do next - for our economy, our government and our culture - needs to be new, even if that is a bit scary.

Which Still Does Not Answer The Question of the Mug

Do I glue it back together, as a symbolic act that presages the rebuilding of our country and politics? Or do I chuck its pieces as a symbolic act of embracing the future in all its uncertainty? Important information: I have more than enough other mugs, so general coffee receptacle availability will not be meaningfully affected either way.