Biden...His Time?

See what we did there? Biden v Biding? Ah...the comedy just doesn't stop here. It doesn't really start either but you get the idea.

The only pic of a great man, AND a president of the USA.

The best laid plans of mice and men often fall asunder.

Mostly on account of both prevailing winds, as well as unexpected changes in narrative, but still. What you expect you will do is often/frequently at great odds with what, in the end, you actually do.

Witness my involvement in the poorly named OZYFEST, along with my ill-timed time at OZY. When I saw on the schedule that I was lined up to be in attendance at a VIP dinner with George W. Bush’s brain Karl Rove, I was…excited. The punk rock kid in me. With his guard let down I’d hit him with my best shots and be able to look in his eyes while he explained the run up to the Gulf War, the bullshit weapons of mass destruction dodge and other great crimes and misdemeanors of his administration and the administrations of the party he favored.

Getting to the venue, Minton’s up in Harlem, a circumstance that couldn’t have been more favorable to my broadsides, Rove sees me, makes a beeline for me and within minutes…actually minutes he had upended each and every one of my plans. He was smart, funny and engaging and beyond all of that he was an elitist after my own true heart who hand waved away his indiscretions.

[T]he softening I am seeing from unexpected quarters — Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, two very rich Negroes throwing their support behind Trump, as is most surprisingly Michael Rapaport — has Trump sliding into office while the Establishment tries to figure out what the hell just happened…

How so? Pretty much his take, in a nutshell, was that bad things happen to stupid people and in the end you can’t help stupid. All of which was a pretty punk rock sentiment.

I shook it off and the very next of days backstage at the big stage in New York’s Central Park, we stood in a velvet roped VIP section awaiting the arrival of Dr. Jill Biden and her husband, then Vice President Joe Biden. Secret Service, stony faced, milled about, flag lapel pins in place, and then there was a hush and then a bustle and down a small flight of stairs the pre-presidential couple appeared at the foot of the raised platform where I stood with my wife.

As Biden made his way up the stairs I was all smiles. I had voted for Joe back when his campaign was derailed by plagiarism allegations and I was glad to see him moving toward me smiling. Like he knew me.

“Heya Joe…”

“Well HELLO to you, man” he said. Smile wattage at 1000. “Glad to finally meet you.”

I don’t know who he thought I was, since I am fairly certain it wasn’t me, but I was glad for the conviviality.

And as his eyes swung to my left, to where my wife was standing I got the politico body check. He simultaneously dropped my hand, elbowed me to the side and gripped my wife’s hand tightly while pulling her in to him. Close. And then closer.

“And this is my wife Joe…”

“I see you’ve done what I’ve done,” he said, pulling off his sunglasses and staring deeply into my wife’s eyes.

“What’s that?” I ask, now laughing since what he’s doing is what I’ve done hundreds of times so I know it’s part compulsion, part habit, all fuck you.

“Married above your station,” and with that a hug and a too long kiss on the cheek. I actually had to put my referee hands between them to pry him away. All with near tears in my eyes. From laughter.

For so many different reasons but mostly because at 75, the age he was at the time, he had enough game to run it right in front of me. Without fear of repercussion or correction. Even if the last time I had my ass kicked by a 75 year old was never. In fact, not to be agist, but there was not much I imagined that a septuagenarian could beat me at.

Moreover, there was not much, and certainly not many fields of endeavor where I think it’d even make sense to try. Outside of chess, poker and maybe golf. No, wherever Golden Pond is, I’ve always felt, old folks should go there to be there, enjoying their dotage.

[W]hat will have happened is that the candidate with the greatest historical negatives of any candidate to ever run for the office, wins it, and four more years or, realistically, forever, of it.

That is, until I turned 61. Then I went from fairly certain to certain beyond a shadow of a doubt: old people need to be off doing old people things.

Running for the presidency might not be one of those old people things and watching the DNC — who I first imagined was setting a pick (in basketball terms) with an intention to swap him out at the last minute for a Gavin Newsom or a Kamala Harris — whistle past the graveyard, doesn’t have me worried about 2024 electoral prospects. It does, however, have me poised to deliver the biggest and most full-throated “I told you SO” ever.

I can imagine that Trump and the Crimes of Trump are enough to solidify what could be a fatal overconfidence on DNC’s part that America will be guided by a sense of propriety and a desire for the grandfatherly appeal of a Biden.

I can also imagine that the softening I am seeing from unexpected quarters — Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, two very rich Negroes throwing their support behind Trump, as is most surprisingly Michael Rapaport — has Trump sliding into office while the Establishment tries to figure out what the hell just happened. And what will have happened is that the candidate with the greatest historical negatives of any candidate to ever run for the office, wins it, and four more years or, realistically, forever, of it.

I have no dog in this hunt. If things work right for me, this time next year I’ll be an ex-pat, safely ensconced in my mountain redoubt in Spain, so this is much less about me, and much more about the shrugging fatalism that has my party, and the DNC, trying to convince me that everything is going to be OK in 2024. Especially when I can see that America and the Americans in it, are not yet full of the kind of craziness that Trump has settled around the heads of everyone within the sound of his voice.

So it’s not so much that I am saying that Biden is more unfit to lead than Trump, but it’s much more that our lady and the tiger choices have tigers behind both doors. And the inability or unwillingness of anyone in a position of power on the left and on the right to show an understanding embrace of such is at best, disheartening. At worst? Terrifying.

Despite my lack of interest in having an almost 82-year-old cook, barista, plumber, pilot, cab driver, dentist or doctor, never mind president do very much for me, not to mention his addled almost 78-year-old challenger, I’m not agist. I’m just 61, almost 62, and I have a running checklist of things I’m no longer as good at and it includes almost everything. Would/could the presidency be much different?

Time will tell. And if you would, could you later tell me what time’s told you? I’ll be on the Mediterranean somewhere. Wishing you all the best.

Me + the Future Mrs. Joe Biden

---

OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?

I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. We need at least 50 reviews. At last count there were 49 written reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!!