Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, wrote the Victorian historian-aristocrat Lord Acton in a letter to an Anglican bishop nearly 140 years ago. But a more apt aphorism for our times would be “power tends to isolate and absolute power isolates absolutely”. A look at what is happening in the US appears to underline this truth, with President Joe Biden stubbornly refusing to see the writing on the wall, if not in the ballot box.
As if his train wreck of a debate with former President and current challenger for the White House Donald Trump was not enough to convince all but the most obtuse that Biden is past his sell-by date, he has followed it up with almost equally dismal interviews with a TV channel and a couple of radio shows. He was not as zoned out in those interviews as in the debate, but he did not come across having the wherewithal—mental acuity—to last another four years.
Even when the TV interviewer gave him openings to show he is aware of what he is up against, Biden refused to play ball. He said that short of “God Almighty” asking him to step aside, he would continue his re-election campaign, no matter who or how many in his party try to convince him (and his family) to step aside, on the basis of a flood of opinion polls showing he was trailing Trump by a wide margin. Is geriatric incomprehension? Or the effect of isolation?
India has recently seen that opinion polls—and even exit polls—can be totally off mark, in toto. So Biden’s campaign managers and family can mistrust them. But the surveys are not always wrong. In the just-concluded UK elections, opinion and exit polls were bang on target, to the extent of getting the exact Labour Party tally right. If India’s pollsters were suffering from the same disconnect that affects politicians, their western counterparts clearly are not that isolated.
But Biden has dispelled all talk of contrary opinion polls and plummeting approval ratings as the surveys by his campaign apparently do not corroborate what all other polls have been showing for the past year. But if the media and the Democratic Party managers do believe the polls, why have they taken so long to sound the alarm? Did they believe that Trump would be stymied by convictions, leaving the field open even for a much-diminished Biden to win?
With apologies to Robert Burns, did their best laid plans go awry because six judges of the US Supreme Court threw an unexpected legal curve ball by defining Presidential immunity? Is that why both the US media and the Democratic Party have suddenly discovered Biden’s acuity issues only now? The timing certainly points to that, which should make the American public wary henceforth of believing anything else they say—or do not, as the case may be.
Even for the lay American voter, including the ones who cannot stand Trump, Biden does not seem to be all there. The innocuous questions asked in the ABC interview had stings in their tails that Biden missed, like the one asking if he would submit to a mental acuity test by an “independent” panel and make the results public. By agreeing, he would admit earlier doctors were not reliable; by not agreeing he would risk voters thinking he would fail such a test.
Biden obviously did not agree to a test, thereby harking back to the damaging “opinion” in the report by Robert Hur, the special prosecutor who investigated whether Biden had kept official documents in his private home in Delaware after he had demitted office as Vice President. Hur concluded in his report made public in February that Biden could not be tried as he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with poor memory”. Biden had ignored the report.
Hur had “uncovered evidence” that Biden had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice-presidency “when he was a private citizen” but felt “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his Eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of wilfulness.” As Biden only announced his re-election bid two months after the report, Hur obviously presumed he would retire.
After that report, and certainly after Biden threw his hat in the ring again, some Democrats showed concern about his fitness, mental and physical, especially considering incidents of him tripping, falling off a bicycle, fumbling and freezing. But that fell on deaf ears—including in the US media which was focussed only on Trump’s trials and travails for months. That points to the malaise of isolation and deafness spreading among the four pillars of democracy in the US.
The US media is now defending itself by indicating the Biden camp was not open to probes. But as one media oldtimer pointed out, does the press need permission to investigate anyone? Biden rarely meets the media; only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan held fewer press meets. In his first two years Biden had only 54 press interactions, Trump had 202 and Barack Obama had 275. Why did the media fall in with this arrangement? To save him his blushes?
And why did the Democratic Party not mull a Plan B long before Biden’s debacle on TV? Why are they scrambling to convene meetings to identify alternatives now? Some have even been suddenly talking up Kamala Harris as a worthy stand-in, while others are pushing for turning the Democratic National Convention in August into a compressed primary to decide on Who Else But Biden. Why should voters accept a new candidate just three months before Voting Day?
That Biden and his family are living in a bubble, unable or unwilling to see his frailty is obvious. It is not the first time that the White House has acted as a sound-proof room. They also seem unaware that the internet is rife with videos of his discernible decline: Biden 2019 is shockingly different from Biden 2024. In the age of information, it is hard to isolate the people from the truth about a politician, but politicians can still become isolated from the people, it seems.
Comments
0 comment