For political junkies looking for entertainment, here’s the disappointing truth: Joe Biden is at his best when he’s being boring.
If his speeches are the political equivalent of a Lunesta, that’s a good thing, at least for him. If he’s able to pass off his policies as some sort of recycled, Obama-era mush with a bit of liberal spice added to the mix, so much the better.
He’s Warren G. Harding 2.0, promising a return to normalcy after President Donald Trump.
Of course, he’s also like Harding in another way. In a time when social media consisted of the letters to the editor section in the newspaper, our 29th president committed what might have been the ultimate political gaffe when he wrote, according to The New York Times that, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”
He was right, of course, but it wasn’t something the media was interested in reporting at the time. Just imagine if telegraph lines had been able to support some rudimentary form of Twitter.
And therein lies the reason political junkies looking for entertainment needn’t be disappointed: Joe Biden isn’t going to be boring.
For Democrats, however, that could be very bad news, particularly when it comes to who their alternatives are.
As of right now, Biden still leads by 11.8 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, which is generally a reliable indicator of how a candidate is doing. The problem is that the average is derived from polls that are all over the place, between one survey showing the former vice president up by 18 points and another that showed him down by 1 to both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
What ought to be worrying is that all of these polls were taken during the last two weeks and that the trend, such as one can be reliably established, shows Biden’s lead shrinking.
The last two polls, surveys from the Economist/YouGov and Emerson, show him up by only 4 and 7 points, respectively.
This was before his latest gaffe, in which it turns out a story of military heroism he’s told on numerous occasions was, at best, several different stories amalgamated into one. He promptly issued a response which could be boiled down to “sorry not sorry.”
This gaffe felt dire enough to be of Kinnockian proportions — as opposed to, say, the merely offensive malapropism “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” — and still managed to make its way into a news cycle that includes a hurricane.
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