Limed for the Truth

Jospeh Biden as a Presidential candidate is the equivalent of that amazing local band you love that hasn’t quite managed to make it big. The one with the lyrics that almost bring you to tears, every line lifted out of your life. The one with the music that fills every beating vein and joint and muscle and thought. The one that just doesn’t write singles or songs that fit a radio format. The one that might never be famous because of it.

I don’t mean to suggest that Joseph Biden is long winded. In fact it is somewhat remarkable the extent to which his long stint in the Senate has left to him the capacity to express himself without rambling. One needs only to attempt to listen to a certain junior Senator from New York whose unfocused eyes bulge and emptily roll from left to right and right to left with a kind of seasick nausea as her prepared statement drags on and on, boring even herself to the limits of physical endurance, to understand the potency and malignant character of the Senatorial Disease Biden has resisted.

He is, in fact, charming and funny without being undignified in the same way as John McCain, but even more so. He is also capable of bringing his audience near to tears. He connects, he is unpretentious when he quotes Emerson or Keats, he inspires idealism. It is clear that he is well read and is himself sincerely inspired by the works of the men and women he quotes.

His remarks seldom focus on culture war and seldom elicit the kind of anger that other politicians mobilize in order to gain support, perhaps because his chosen concentration in the field of foreign policy has focused his political faculties in directions which are less partisan than contentious domestic and cultural issues. Biden’s concentration on foreign policy allows him a kind of simple self-evident authority when he speaks on that subject. When he does speak to domestic issues his themes revolve around opportunity for the less fortunate and the kind of Kennedy-esque appeal for idealistic struggle sacrifice that motivated so many of the politicians of his generation and party to enter public life.

Biden’s informality tempts me to describe his style as avuncular, but in reality it is more fatherly or grandfatherly. Combined with his excellent communication skills it is tempting to compare his persona to that of Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, Biden has something of that quality that makes you feel as though you have an individual relationship with him, he has the capacity to potentially inspire great personal loyalty.

But Joseph Biden, for all these strengths, has a problem. His strengths don’t seem to fit into snap shots or sound bites. If you look at a photo of Joe Biden his tanned skin, styled hair and bleached white teeth remind one of a game show host - the paragon of insincerity. And in 1988 it was this casual impression of insincerity coupled with his habit of reading and quoting widely that killed Joe Biden’s chances of winning the Democratic Presidential nomination. In one of the variants of his stump speech Biden would riff on a theme originally writen by a contemporary British Labour politician, Neil Kinnock. Almost uniformly he credited the British politician in his speech, but one night he forgot. This omission was coupled with a charge of plagiarism from his days as a law student. In a first year legal writing class Biden cited an article in a practice brief with a single footnote rather than the mulitple footnotes required.

The Dukakis campaign was able to capitalize on these small errors to paint a picture of Biden as insincere because it combined so well with the initial perception he gives. Republicans were able to capitalize similarly on John Kerry’s aloofness and Al Gore’s stiffness in 2004 and 2000. What remains to be seen in Joe Biden’s pursuit of the Presidency is whether in an age of short video clips and soundbites he can truly express who he is and what he brings to the table.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 12:13 pm and is filed under World & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.