8/6/23

AS THE CASE AGAINST ‘THE DEFENDANT’ UNFOLDS, LET’S KEEP JOE BIDEN IN MIND.
AND PUT HIM ON PAGE ONE

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, on vacation in Delaware, rides a bike. CREDIT: AP, Manuel Balce Ceneta.

ONE PROBLEM with the Trump prosecutions is not that they use up all the oxygen in the Republican primary – since that would suggest that today’s Republicans are people who actually breath in and out, which, in turn, promotes effective brain function.
   The real issue is that the relentless focus on Trump and his accomplices increases the invisibility that plagues Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats.
   Biden is uniquely difficult to pay attention to.
   In the best of times, he’s just not very interesting. And certainly, he can’t compete in occupying the limited reach of the media spotlight on a day-to-day,  weekly, monthly or even a yearly basis. On any given day, there’s always news that’s more compelling than what Joe Biden says and does.
   For example, Joe Biden was not the person who, a week ago offered to slit the throats of the nation’s 2.1 million federal workers.
   That idea came from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who supposedly is running for the Republican nomination for president and was day dreaming during a New Hampshire campaign stop about turning the Oval Office into a butcher shop. Here’s how DeSantis put it:
   “On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on Day One and be ready to go.”
   Nor was Joe Biden the sociopath, who on the day after his arraignment on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, took to “Truth Social”  to issue this not-too-subtle warning to friend and foe alike:
   “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
   Actually, that was the man known as “The Defendant” in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who earlier been admonished by a judge not to have unsupervised contact with potential witnesses.
   To the contrary, while all of this was going on,  Joe Biden, also known as the actual President of the United States, was on vacation in Delaware, where he dropped in at a seafood joint, rode his bike without falling off (as far as we know) and managed, with his wife,  to sit through the three-hour-long cinematic opus, “Oppenheimer.”
   “Compelling,” was Biden’s only comment about the week’s events,  and,  again, that referred to what was going on in the movie house, not the courthouse.
   To be fair, Biden’s vacation provided him one of the rare instances in which he  was perfectly happy to be out of range of the news klieg lights, since he’s pretending to be detached from The Defendant’s legal entanglements, lest the Chief Executive be accused of having anything to do with the activities  of the people he appointed to run the U.S. Department of Justice.
   But even if Biden had issued a totally appropriate tongue-lashing to his predecessor, or his predecessor’s worshipful “opponents,” it probably wouldn’t have drawn as much coverage as whatever The Defendant or any prospective Throat-slitter said or did.
    Unless he falls off his bike or miscalculates on the details of ending our involvement in Afghanistan, Biden is mostly ignored. By the media; by all of us.

THIS IS MASSIVELY UNFAIR.
     Because we owe Joe Biden big time for his major accomplishment, which is to run a Normal United States of America.
   Normal, by definition, is unexciting. But Normal, routine and business-as-usual are the bread-and-butter of both our private lives and our shared experiment in democracy.
   It’s taken for granted that  Social Security payments show up at their appointed electronic destinations on time and in full once a month.  It's supposed to work this way: that Medicare and Medicaid will routinely pay (actually, underpay) the country’s hospital bills. It's supposed be that the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Agriculture, NASA, the CIA, the FDA, the ATF and AMTRAK will rumble and sputter along as expected, imperfectly doing what they are asked to do, usually out of sight and forgotten except for their immediate constituents.
  To use a cliché, Biden’s problem is that good news is no news, because in the news biz, good news doesn’t sell.
   This is despite the fact that no-news is what we craved during the awful years of The Defendant’s presidency, when we went to bed every night scared, and woke up every morning terrified. And with good reason, since The Defendant turned out not just to be a clown, but a monster.
   Back during The Defendant’s presidency, we begged for the boredom of Normal, at home and abroad. What we needed, prayed for was what seemed a miracle: that an aging, affable Uncle Joe would come to rescue us, a trusted old soul, who knew how to water, weed and fertilize Uncle Sam’s withering  garden.
   As of noon Jan. 20, 2021,Joe Biden delivered.
   Every day, every night since, everyone’s second choice for  president continues to do what he was hired to do, restoring  order and justice to American life.
   Ever since, our collective thank-you has been to take Uncle Joe for granted, rarely giving him credit for returning the country to a respectable, consistent, predictable version of American Normal; instead mainly we forget that he’s in charge or even in the White House.

 WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
   Well, it’s impossible to make boring exciting.
   But we can keep Uncle Joe in our thoughts and prayers and perferably on Page One.
  Democrats and  their friends should speak up about Biden’s accomplishments in keeping the economy – unfair as it is, since it is a capitalist operation – humming; we need to speak up about Biden’s continuing fight against climate change – feeble as that is compared to the scope of the  crisis; we need to speak up about his continuing commitment  – through surrogates – to face down Russia’s attack on Ukraine; and we need to speak up about his  continuing day-in, and day-out advocacy – when it suits him – for kindness, civility and decency.
   It would also help if the media would do its part.
   If I were the editor of one of America’s two remaining great newspapers, CEO of the Associated Press, captain of a TV network, chief “influencer” of some social nonsense site,  I would institute this policy,:
   TO TAKE EFFECT IMMEDIATELY:
   Whenever The Defendant or one or more of his co-conspirators, and/or his imitators, known and unknown to the Grant Jury, are featured in a news story, there must be a companion story about Joe Biden, of equal force and display.
   Not because the Biden story would be of equal news value in the sense of traditional gee-whiz, can-you-believe-that, call-up-your-mother news. It will never be that. 
   But because it’s in everyone's interest to remove the invisibility shield that hides the accomplishments of a good, decent and generally competent man who has brought Normal back to the American experiment.
   So, when The Defendant says or does something terrible, it’s newsworthy. But so is the mandatory Joe Biden story next to it. Maybe it’s a story that Biden did not say or do something terrible in contrast to those who did. Maybe it’s a story that a man in his 80s rides a bicycle, rather than rides around in a golf cart. Maybe it’s a story that he appointed someone competent to his Cabinet, rather than slitting his or her throat.
   Whatever the case, Joe Biden needs equal billing with the Forces of Darkness which almost destroyed democracy a few years ago and are hoping to learn from their mistakes and do things right next year.
   What Joe Biden has done and continues to do means that there is hope for our democracy and that there’s a real chance  it will flourish, improve and endure.
   Which, these days,  is as good as the news gets.