Once upon a time, a Congressman named Matt Gaetz was accused of sex trafficking and pedophilia.
Once upon a time, a commentator named Tucker Carlson told treacherous lies on television.
Once upon a time, a Congresswoman named Marjorie Taylor Greene discounted the 9/11 attacks, actually averring, “There’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.”
Once upon a time, a president named Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection by more than seven million votes but told the world he had won in a landslide.
More like a mudslide, really.
Once upon a time, all these dangerous demagogues would be dismissed as imbeciles. Today, in their world of alternative facts, they are adored as icons. These are the times in which we live.
That’s why they, and others like them, get away with flagrantly perfidious portrayals of Joe Biden: “Sleepy Joe,” “in mental decline,” a “doddering old fool.” Their followers eat it up. None less than Trump’s bromantic bud Vladimir Putin, after his June summit with Biden, dismissed those spiteful characterizations, saying they have “nothing to do with reality… because he does not miss a thing.” But the cutting narratives keep coming.
Sometimes Biden’s caustic critics focus on the president's slips of the tongue, conveniently ignoring that as a child he stuttered, for heaven’s sake, and overcame it. They also ignore what they, as public figures, know full well, which is something I learned myself as a radio talk show host for a half-dozen years between two television networks: when you publicly utter thousands upon thousands of words every day of the week, a slip of the tongue now and then is inevitable.
Wasn’t it the leader of their cult who coined the word, “Covfefe?”
So let’s look at just how “doddering” our 78-year-old president is.
After 258 days in office— or as he would say, “That’s not even nine months, man”— Joe Biden has dealt with more issues and more crises than almost any president who came before him.
He pushed financial pandemic relief through Congress. He boosted vaccinations, free of charge, after inheriting no plan from his predecessor. He pulled our economy back around. He put America back in the fight against climate change. He airlifted out 120,000 frightened people from the Taliban and took this nation out of an unwinnable war. And he’s still at work, trying to win passage of his transformative infrastructure plans, not to mention ramping up U.S. defenses against an increasingly assertive China.
This is in spite of what he inherited— the pandemic, the economic catastrophe, the war, and as icing on a contagious cake, the insurrection— and in spite of a tenor in politics as toxic as any we remember.
We can have honest arguments about his goals or, in the case of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, its execution. But “doddering?” Hardly.
What’s more, although he generally focuses on forward progress and just ignores resistance and ridicule from the other side of the aisle, Biden hasn’t shied away from fights when they’re fights worth having. The debt limit’s one of them. With the nation’s economy on the brink of default this month if the limit isn’t raised, Mitch McConnell and his minions are playing perilous politics with our money, refusing to cooperate on raising the debt limit— something Trump’s Republicans enthusiastically backed three times in the past four years after contributing mightily to that debt— which led President Biden to call their brinkmanship “hypocritical, dangerous, and disrespectful” and to demand, “Stop playing Russian Roulette with the U.S. economy.”
He’s not too sleepy to put on the gloves.
And by the way, in the latest review of his first eight months in office, Joe Biden went out to a golf course nine times. At that pace it will work out to fewer than 14 golf games per year. The former president? He played 308 times in his four years in office. That comes to 77 per year. Or, slightly more than once every five days.
Who’s doddering now?
Nothing I see makes me think Joe Biden is doddering. It makes me think he is dogged, unremitting, indefatigable.
I would also apply some adjectives to Donald Trump during his four years in office, when he often spent his mornings in what the White House euphemistically called “Executive time”— tweeting and watching Fox News, along with time on the tanning bed— and didn’t show up in the Oval until 11. There are many words, but indefatigable isn’t one of them.
Hopefully one day the story of this era will begin, “Once upon a time, a 78-year-old president got more done than almost any other president in history… all of whom, incidentally, were younger than he was.” Then, hopefully, history will render the “once upon a time” demagogues— the accused pedophile, the lying commentator, the conspiracy theorist, the seditious president, and all their true believers— as footnotes, if not forgotten.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.