Chancing It and Showing Up

Another day, another gaffe. Such is the state of the American presidency. If one is young enough, they would find this entirely ordinary. While there are many faults to find with the kids these days, they oughtn't be blamed for this aspect of their sorry attitudes. However, Joe Biden’s latest slip, at a campaign event in Detroit with the NAACP on Sunday, is something else.

“When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic and what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it,” Biden said. He was not, in fact, vice president during any portion of the pandemic...

Biden has enjoyed a great deal of latitude from black voters, who understandably appreciate his loyalty during the actual time he spent as vice president to Barack Obama. This allowed him a great deal of grace following the “articulate and bright and clean” foul-up during the initial campaign. This respect was ready enough that, as his confidence ballooned, he dropped the astonishing, “They gon’ put y’all back in chains,” during the team's reelection bid. It would be relegated to a right-wing talking point. Ditto for his “You ain’t black!” quip eight years later.

But Biden’s ability at the podium is far from what it used to be, and ordinary voters of all shades have economic expectations that are not tied to their mastery of monetary policy. His declining popularity with a demographic whose votes he’d felt comfortable taking as a given means he must be there, somewhere, anywhere, and speak.

After seeing the President's remarks, my thoughts went to Peter Sellers and Ruth Attaway in 1979's Being There.

The picture's writer/director Hal Ashby had flair and tendency toward the exaggerative. It could be said he was also a bit overconfident traversing the nation's black/white divide. But the famous scene above surely expressed a common, frustrated suspicion among black Americans that a smiley disposition and familiarity with high-class manners could take a talentless white man to unimaginable places. In the 45 years since the movie's release, that suspicion has hardly decreased. Yet for most of those 45 years, there wasn't anybody quite so like Chauncey Gardiner running the show.

Is it merely a matter of time before more of the audience notices?