looking for Jackie
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the slip-up as the result of Walorski being on the President’s mind and his official schedule: “He had already planned to welcome the congresswoman’s family to the White House on Friday. There will be a bill signing in her honor this coming Friday. So, of course, she was on his mind. She was of top of mind for the President.” After reporters pressed her on the incident, Jean-Pierre maintained, “All of you may have views on—on how I’m answering it, but I am answering the question to the way that he saw it and the way that we see it.”
I have already written about Biden’s rhetoric, his “spectacle of blunder and reassurance.” If this gaffe was notable, it was not because it was out of character but because it was a particularly morbid demonstration of the mounting disorientation of the Biden Era. This was all blunder, no reassurance. As a faux pas, its tactlessness surpassed even his referring to Australian PM Scott Morrison as “that fella Down Under” last year.
A few days ago, in a speech in Maryland, Biden misspoke again: “Let me start off with two words: Made In America. [applause] Made In America.” The right gleefully incorporated this into their tired and humorless “Let’s Go Brandon” schtick, but this sort of gaffe is far more commonplace. (Trump, for his part, recently said at a rally that “we have to keep our country gay” instead of “keep our country great.”) All presidents have malaprops and spoonerisms, with YouTube compilations for every administration. Bad jokes and bad information yield bloopers: Obama saying that he visited 57 states, Reagan claiming that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles.”
Biden, though, has long been prone to gaffes. Both “Where’s Jackie?” and “Made In America” have analogous incidents from the 2008 campaign trail. At one event, Biden applauded wheelchair-bound State Senator Chuck Graham, telling him to “stand up, Chuck, let em see you.” He quickly caught himself: “Oh! God love ya, what am I talking about. I’ll tell you what, you’re making everyone else stand up, pal.” At another, Biden talked about “a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.” His long career of misspeaking, like his much-cited speech impediment, has somewhat softened the more recent worsening of his missteps.
No president in the televised era, of course, could ever surpass George W. Bush. His botched folksiness was the defining quality of his presidency, not just because of the frequency and magnitude of his mistakes, but because they often revealed more about the crimes and follies of his administration than anything else he had to say. When Bush said that “When we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace” or “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the War On Terror,” he accidentally articulated the dissonance of waging a war on terror, which lay beneath all the Sunday-school, tough-Texan talk of crusades and freedom. Greatest hits like “Is our children learning?” and “You fool me, you can’t get fooled again” are nothing compared to such truthful accidents as “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful. So are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people. And neither do we.”
With Bush, with a younger Biden, with most of us who have been to a wedding or watched the news, a gaffe is made better by its correction or recognition. This was central to Bush’s charm—his bashfulness was almost endearing. After his famous line, in a 2001 press conference, that people “misunderestimate—excuse me, underestimate” the administration, he followed up, to laughter: “Just making sure you were paying attention.” As when he attempted to open a locked door in Beijing in 2005, there was something adolescent and clownish to him, befitting an American dynast who failed all the way up.
The apotheosis of Bush’s slip-ups occurred earlier this year, in a speech at the Bush Institute, in which the former president criticized Putin’s War on Ukraine, “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… uh, I mean, of Ukraine. Heh, Iraq, too—anyway. [sigh] I’m 75.” During his presidency, Bush’s gaffes often had a Freudian quality, as if his brain couldn’t process the doublespeak required to sell the American people on his own doomed wars. At the Bush Institute, it didn’t seem so Freudian anymore. Here was an aging ex-president, awkwardly admitting that he had bungled not just a phrase but an era. His self-correction—“I’m 75”—only emphasized that presidential rhetoric is a performance, often intentionally obscure, and one that gets harder to do as you get older.
Biden’s self-corrections come late or mumbled, if at all. Watching him speak, it feels sometimes that we are stuck in the dead air between the mistake and the acknowledgment that never comes, or comes later in the guarded language of a press release. Whether or not this is proof of mental deterioration is not for me to say—and it hardly mattered with Reagan, whose aides choreographed his days. I suppose it is preferable to have a geriatric president who can pass legislation than a charismatic one who can’t. But the slow atrophy of Biden’s gaffes has a mournful quality. We wait in the widening interval between incoherence and coherence.
With Trump, there was little hope of coherence on any terms other than the man’s own voracious need for approval. Faced with similar accusations of decline in 2020, Trump took a mental acuity test. As he described in a Beckettian interview with Fox News, he had to remember words like “Person, woman, man, camera, TV.” His rambling is notable less for whatever it might reveal about his lucidity than for the persistence, despite his supposed decline, of his narcissism: “It’s actually not that easy but for me it was easy. That’s not an easy question.” Twice Trump says, “If you get it in order, you get extra points.”
Through the dulling and warping of age, Trump’s narcissism remains. That for Biden what remains is condolence and camaraderie, rather than bravado and hostility, is better, and makes for a gentler decline. But the President squinting into a roomful of onlookers, searching for his recently dead colleague, will be yet another artifact of these adrift and spectral days. I didn’t think she was going to be here. Maybe Biden felt something was off, something he couldn’t quite name or place. He would have been right.
ben tapeworm