Never has the nickname “Slow Joe” Biden fit better than in today’s somnambulistic performance from his home in Delaware about what he thinks needs to be done about the coronavirus. Take in this 60 second excerpt from the middle of his remarks and ask yourself if this looks like a person who can make it to November:
I’ll bet you didn’t know that Biden was such an expert on logistics. And about sending the military to collect medical supplies overseas . . . um, what? C’mon, man!
Two observations: If you watch the whole thing, Biden doesn’t suggest a single thing that the Trump administration isn’t already doing. So why did he bother? Which leads to the second point: he is so dismal in this video that you have to wonder how his campaign staff let him go forward with it. It is clear he had difficulty with the teleprompter or whatever cueing prop he was trying to use.
Is it a mere coincidence that there is a lot of chatter erupting right now that, gosh, by golly, that Governor Andrew Cuomo sure would make a great nominee against Trump in November.
This does take me back. In 1984 I attended the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco with a press credential, and was in the hall for Gov. Mario Cuomo’s electrifying keynote address on the opening night. Cuomo had only been elected governor in a close race in 1982, and so was still unknown even to many Democrats. Everyone pretty much knew that Mondale was a sure loser to Ronald Reagan in the fall, and you heard a lot of chatter in and around the convention hall over the next 48 hours that, gee—wouldn’t it be great if we could dump Mondale and run Mario Cuomo instead?
History seems to be skipping straight to the “repeat-as-farce” stage right now. Hell, Mondale at 92 today would be a better candidate than Biden. Except that Republicans seem to have swiped Mondale’s industrial policy for themselves, so who knows what he’d have to run on except for Minnesota Nice.
