If only he’d walked out the open door and retreated to the safety of the Oval Office. If only he hadn’t returned to the presidential podium to field a question about the Gaza War, a crisis he seemed almost relieved to address after being pummelled by the White House press corps over his fading memory and advancing age.
On another day, Joe Biden’s answer that Israel’s military conduct in Gaza has been “over the top” – his sharpest rebuke to date – might have produced the main headline. But then, in a near whisper, he confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, a mix-up which instantly became a meme. A gaffe heard around the world.
The worst slips of the political tongue always draw attention to a pre-existing condition. Cognitive decline has long been this 81-year-old president’s Achilles heel. The very reason Biden stood in front of a microphone in the first place was to address the nation about a startling report released by special prosecutor Robert Hur, who decided not to prosecute the president for mishandling classified documents partly because “Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
In an assessment that was arguably more wounding than an indictment, Biden could not remember key dates from his years as vice president, according to Hur, or even when his beloved son, Beau, had died from cancer – an accusation which Biden angrily denied.
On the Richter scale of gaffes, then, Biden’s Mexican muddle registered as a mighty quake. His remarks were delivered in primetime, with millions watching. The White House had choreographed the event to counter a problem that Biden ended up exacerbating. It capped off a week in which Biden had already mixed up the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor from the last century, François Mitterrand, and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl with his protégé, Angela Merkel. It instantly gave wavering voters, worried about Biden’s age but anxious about Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, permission not to vote for him. In short, it underscored the insuperability of Biden’s age problem, and how addressing it inexorably makes it worse.
In this era of listicle journalism, the Mexico slip instantly joined the inventory of infamous gaffes. Up there, though not quite on a par, with Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables”, vice president Dan Quayle misspelling of the word “potato” in front of a class of schoolchildren who knew it didn’t end with “e”, and Michael Dukakis, the Democrats’ 1988 presidential nominee, being driven around in a tank wearing an oversized helmet that made him look like one of Hogan’s heroes.
Trump, though more energetic, has memory problems, too. In what some have called a game of senility snap, the 77-year-old has confused the leaders of Turkey and Hungary, and recently mistook his Republican rival, Nikki Haley, for his Democratic nemesis Nancy Pelosi. The hashtag #DementiaDon has been trending on social media.
But the cumulative effect of Biden’s gaffes has been to produce an electoral maths in which his 81 years are becoming more salient than Trump’s numerous lapses or even his 91 felony charges. In a poll conducted for The New York Times, 70 per cent of voters in key battleground states agreed with the statement that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president”.
Where does Biden’s latest gaffe rate among the biggest political slips?
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12.02.2024
If only he’d walked out the open door and retreated to the safety of the Oval Office. If only he hadn’t returned to the presidential podium to field a question about the Gaza War, a crisis he seemed almost relieved to address after being pummelled by the White House press corps over his fading memory and advancing age.
On another day, Joe Biden’s answer that Israel’s military conduct in Gaza has been “over the top” – his sharpest rebuke to date – might have produced the main headline. But then, in a near whisper, he confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, a mix-up which instantly became a meme. A gaffe heard around the world.
The worst slips of the political tongue always draw attention to a pre-existing condition. Cognitive decline has long been this 81-year-old president’s Achilles heel. The very reason Biden stood in front of a........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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