Harrison (Harry) Porter was finally into his ninth decade but in good health and spirits. He and the President were exactly the same age but while Harry was as eloquent, sharp-tongued and quick-witted as anyone decades younger, Biden was failing, on an intellectual ledge, teetering but managing to hold his balance while the crowd below oohed and ahhed in anticipation of a fall.
“You’ve got the prostate of a 50-year old”, his doctor told him, “the heart of an Olympian, and the inner workings of a man half your age.”
“Yes, but numbers don’t lie”, replied Harry, knowing that according to even the most optimistic actuarial tables, he was in his last years.
“Don’t be depressed about it”, the doctor said “Everyone’s got to go sometime”.
Cold comfort. Huis Clos took on a different meaning. The door to Hades opens only one way. How did Howard Feinbaum, neighbor and golf partner, do it? Death was not just a trip to the Poconos. Even Feinbaum, a Jewish atheist who had given up on Moses, Ezekiel, and Jacob long ago, should have a few questions about what’s next, what to expect, and was death really that final.
Yet the old alte kocker went about his business, still kept his fingers on the merchandise, prattled on about his little babies Leon and Leah without a second thought. Was this obliviousness to the obvious or some kind of existential strength?
Harry managed to sweep his doubts under the rug every morning when he woke up with dread. His wife’s hectoring, for once in his life, was comforting. If she could still worry about hairs in the sink or the failing grouting in the bathtub, then his fears were unfounded.
Which leads to the more practical, pressing question of what’s what – not answering so much as understanding it. The terrifying aspect of dementia was not that you were deprived of answers but hopeless when it came to questions. The President seemed to be neither here nor there – a seemingly conscious man at least able to make some sense let alone face down a demanding press corps; but he was actually a man adrift.
The good news is that he, unmoored and at the pleasure of favorable breezes, drifted onto happy shores. Some people losing their grasp on reality foundered on the rocks, but Joe Biden made his stops in the happiest places.
“I remember when i was a boy in Delaware”, he said in his opening remarks in Des Moines before cutting a ribbon, “one of the happiest times of my life. It wasn’t God’s country, like here in Iowa, but my mother took care of me, the weather was always fair, and people were good”.
His handlers were used to these fugues. Let him go on, they agreed, if and until he wandered into the shoals and began talking about Lucy Hartford, the now familiar pigtailed, rosy cheeked third grader, his first love. “And it was there, one summer, when I met Lucy Hartford, a sweet, generous, open-hearted young thing that won me once and forever…”
His Chief of Staff hurried to the podium and whispered in his ear, “Good, Mr. President, now think of Lucy milking”; and energized and fueled by memories, the President continued his story by now only confabulation and mixed metaphors. He could only remember the verses of Rossetti, and he recited them to an audience who by now had lost the thread of his purpose.
She wore a kerchief on her neck,
Her bare arm showed its dimple,
Her apron spread without a speck,
Her air was frank and simple.
She milked into a wooden pail
And sang a country ditty,
An innocent fond lovers' tale,
That was not wise nor witty,
Pathetically rustical,
Too pointless for the city.
Quite a handful, Biden’s handlers commiserated. Where was that crackerjack, Donald Trump, man of wit, charm, and outrageous humor. Biden’s staff, although committed to his principles of race, gender, and ethnicity, were weary of day after day of humorless cant. Where was Donald Trump when we most needed him? or Ronald Reagan who could tell a joke like Bob Hope, or that charmer, JFK?
Humor is a function of intelligence, psychologists from Freud to Applebaum have concluded. Bathroom humor doesn’t count, they agreed, but high-toned, ironic, satirical, winnowing humor does. Biden may have once been funny, but whatever comedic edge he may have had was long gone.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is an older man in full possession of his faculties. Now, that man can tell a joke! If there is a candidate who can dispel the doom and gloom of sanctimony, who can make woke simply a tired, unfortunate blip in American politics, and who has not a politically correct bone in is body, it is Donald Trump.
Oh, yes, there is the hush money, the refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat, the pandering to January 6 MAGA crazies, the outrageous bullying of the disabled and other-gendered; but the man is a man who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything. His supporters ignore the allegations of treasonous incitement, disavowal of Constitutional principles, and behavior ‘unbecoming of a President’, He is and always has been what this pussified country needs.
The American Left is afraid of Donald Trump. Otherwise they would let him be, a fat whale floundering on the beach, a passé example of machismo and Wild West irrelevance; but they are obsessed by him, a sore you keep picking at, an insult that keeps you awake, a man of political canniness and ability you simply cannot ignore. He is branded as evil, demonic, misogynistic and racist to the core, but he keeps on whacking away.
Poor Joe Biden. If it weren’t for Kamala Harris and her vaudevillian road show, or the temper tantrums of Congress’ own spoiled two-year old, AOC, he would be on his own, a clown show his alone. Thank God for buffers; but the 2024 election is coming right up, and all things considered Biden has no chance.
An 80+ man, out of his element, befuddled, confused, and hardly able to follow the teleprompter against young firebrands like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis? The unreconstructed liberals scared to death about abortion, immigration, woke sexual transformation, and socialist economics, have scant chance of winning over the majority.
“Get up for it, Mr. President”, urge his advisors; but electoral politics are far from his mind, crowded out as it is by idyllic memories of Lucy and Rehoboth Beach summers. It will be the message that will win the White House, not the man; and only time will tell if the progressive banging and hammering has finally been heard for what it is – political posturing at its very worst.
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