Let Biden Be Biden, So Biden Can Win

Unleash The Scranton Scrapper

Feb 22, 2024

On paper it wouldn’t seem to make sense to call for President Joe Biden to speak off the cuff more often. For most of his political career, Biden’s loose lips have sunk his own political ship.

From the 1980s up until the early 2000s, Biden was most often associated with the political “gaffe,” the slip of the tongue that gets the political media all in a tizzy so they can cover something more attention-grabbing than the day-to-day grind of politics. Fear of the Biden gaffe still has a relatively strong grip on Democratic Party decision making to this day and often during his public appearances you can see Biden doing his best to pull himself back from the edge lest he do the damned thing again.

But I think there’s a decent case to be made that those days are long passed and that his reelection campaign would be better off if the public saw unvarnished and raw Biden.

I say this because it is very apparent that the president has a visceral and legitimate dislike bordering on hatred for Donald Trump. One of my biggest areas of contention with Biden is the gentle approach he takes to many Republicans, reflecting the outdated notion still rampant in Democratic Party leadership that our collective disputes with Republicans aren’t existential but rather based on good-faith disagreements about policy. You can see this in the way Biden has spoken about Mitch McConnell, describing him as a “man of honor,” which is not an assessment based in any sort of reality.

By contrast, Biden recently referred to Trump as a “crazy SOB,” and had one of his best moments during the 2020 campaign when he told Trump to his face to “shut up, man.” When Biden said that he spoke for millions of Americans who wanted to give Trump a tongue lashing for his failures, corruption, and bigotry.

Biden began his successful 2020 campaign by perfectly positioning Trump by accurately quoting his expression of sympathy for Nazis, noting in his campaign launch speech:

“Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued, and a brave young woman lost her life.
And that’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were “some very fine people on both sides.” Very fine people on both sides?
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

Trump is just as bad, if not worse, than he was in 2020. He wants mass roundups of immigrants, has a plan in place to replace the government with a theocracy built in his image, and wants to weaponize the justice system to go after his critics. To combat this, I believe we need Biden, unleashed.

Let the president tell us straight up what he thinks about Trump and his plans for America. Let the president use expletives, rough and simple language, dialogue that is more at home in a union hall than on the floor of Congress, to make the case for why this race is again a “battle for the soul of America.”

I understand the hesitancy when pursuing a path like this. What if Biden says something dumb? What if he makes a slip of the tongue and provides fodder for the Fox News/NY Times spin machine to obsess over on a loop?

News alert: They’re there already. The press is already in full distraction mode and is happily describing the normalcy of the Democratic Party and the extremism of the Republican Party as merely two equal sides of the same coin. A Biden gaffe isn’t going to make this dynamic any worse than it already is.

A big reason why it’s safe – in my opinion – for Biden to gaffe is two words: Barack Obama. Biden spent eight years as Obama’s closest political ally, working as his attack dog against figures like Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan, but also his fiercest public advocate. It was Biden, not Obama, who most accurately described the health care plan as a “big fucking deal.” It was Biden who hyped up Obama, making it clear that it was Obama who made one of the best military calls in eons with the decision to take out Bin Laden.

Standing next to Obama raised Biden’s stature and endeared him to millions of people. When he made verbal gaffes during the 2020 campaign the window clearly shifted. Not only had Biden’s frequent exposure to the public sanded the edges off his “gaffes,” but in contrast to Trump’s mean-hearted mangling of the English language, there was a certain level of comfort with Old Joe.

Neither Biden nor Trump are eloquent speakers, and they both bring to mind an older relative sitting in the den, reclining on their Barcalounger offering up unsolicited takes on the news of the day. But the difference between them is that Trump is the bigoted old guy, reclining and complaining about women or Black and brown people. In this scenario, Biden is the older relative who occasionally swears when he tells the kids about how he killed a Nazi during the war, or slips the kids candy or ice cream when mom already said they had enough. One prompts a “there you go again” eyeroll while any family worth a damn throws out the racist.

Biden holds the most important office in the American government and arguably the world. He ultimately holds the line between the pluralistic society we cherish or the right-wing extremist “Christian” nightmare of the right. Let him loose, let him speak. When he talks smack, he rallies even the people who aren’t wild about him, activating their desire to punish and prevent the right.

Throw caution to the wind and just let Joe do his thing.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977