Not A Clean Getaway

"The lecturer is a bore, but he means well. Bores always do." -- Capt. Jack Harding in Until They Sail


I really dislike Joe Biden. My frequent readers -- all three of them -- know I don’t.

I hammer him whenever I can. I spanked him here and here, and whenever I can in conversations or in print.

What I like about hating him is that I really don’t have to make up anything, or twist anything, or take anything out of context to make fun of him. He is pretentious, smarmy, smug, arrogant, officious, and so obviously fake-folksy, with a phony sledgehammer touch of humorous whimsy and so little sense of people and what the public will find charming, that he makes my life better by making it easier to laugh. To paraphrase Voltaire and his comment about God, if Biden did not exist, we’d have to make him up. Biden actually thinks the Voltaire’s quote was about him.

Still, as I read the outrage over his comments about Illinois U.S. Senator Barack Obama, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Smilin’ Joe.

Here’s what Biden said: Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, first, what did he mean? He says now, that instead of “clean,” he meant “fresh.”

Here in Younstown, clean means “uncorrupted.” We think of “clean” the way people in Kansas think of the ocean. Or the way Rosie O’Donnell thinks of a thong. Oh, and it can also mean "off the bottle or needle," as in having your addiction under control.

But it is not really far fetched that Biden really did mean “fresh” when he said “clean,” since Obama really is fresh, at least in appearance and demeanor, if not in ideas, which he most certainly is not, to the extent he really has any ideas.

And Obama is articulate. He can express himself, not in the ridiculous, rhymy way of Jesse Jackson or the over-the-top silly way of Al Sharpton, but in the measured tone of a statesman. Again, not that I think Obama is really a statesman, but that is his package; that is his appearance. He is respectable in a way that Jackson and Sharpton are not.

I genuinely think that is the way Biden meant it.

You can make a pretty fair argument that words must be viewed, not how they are meant, and not even in their objective, dictionary meaning, but in the way in which they are heard. And for black people, apparently, the word “articulate” has come to be a shorthand for something like “he can speak clearly, like a white man, unlike the rest of those people.”

I think I understand, and even agree with, African-American concerns on this. The word is often used by whites in a way to highlight a given black person’s ability to express themselves well, in a way that it is not often raised with respect to a similarly-well spoken white person.

And a pompous windbag like Biden, who oozes superiority with every smirk of his face, and every drip of his rhetoric, cannot expect that people will kindly overlook such implications.

Still, Biden is also smart enough -- or least he acts like he is smart enough -- to know the way people will see it. He is not a “racist.” (See “Trent Lott.”)

He is not just another white guy who doesn’t “get it.” (See Maryland’s “William Donald Shaeffer.”)

Biden is a liberal Democrat who’s been in politics since the 1970s and who should really understand the ways words are likely to be taken by his audiences.

So maybe Joe is not quite as quick on his patent leather loafers as he acts like he thinks he is.

Maybe he is not actually the smartest guy in any particular room he happens to glide into.

Maybe he is a guy who has generally decent grasp of foreign affairs and not too much else, a good staff, and a way of schmoozing the enough people in Delaware (there are only 715 people in the whole state; we should have real debate in this country as to what it should take to be a real state) that he can get elected, but really nothing too special -- nothing that gives him What It Takes to be president.

I don’t know. But it won’t matter in the long run. Because the media’s focus has already begun to drift from Biden in a way it never did for Trent Lott. Because they like Biden.

As Dan Balz put it in the Washington Post on Thursday:

“A gifted orator, Biden has been plagued by a reputation for being windy and verbose, whether while chairing a Senate hearing or speaking at political gatherings around the country.”

What he should have written is this:

“A boring orator, who could make a deaf man cry with his banal stories and unamusing recollections of his parochial school nuns and faux folk wisdom, Biden has plagued the American political scene with more achingly dull anecdotes than any other U.S. senator. He is a man who can spend ten minutes asking not a single question from his murder hole on the Judiciary Committee, while at the same time making those ten minutes seem like ten years. He is a man who sends nearly every sane person within hearing range in search of the nearest pair of scissors with which to puncture their eardrums. It is not at all surprising that Mr. Biden would embarrass himself as he has done. It just goes to show, if you say enough words, some of them will get you in trouble.”

But Mr. Balz didn’t write that, having already moved on.

So at the end of the day, Biden probably meant well. His statements against Obama and the others were probably more attributable to his anger and ego bruise at not being acclaimed as the obvious best presidential candidate, and frustration clouded his judgment. He can see his own glory; why can’t everyone else?

But Biden won’t be president, although it won’t be because of these statements, and it certainly won’t be because the media will continue to torch him. More hypocrisy from the media.

And it couldn’t happen to a more boring guy.


© Lost in Youngstown and Palinurus 2007.