Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer for The Atlantic, puts Biden’s latest gaffe into context.
On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he told Meet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.
Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.
But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slatelaconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he knelt to engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals…
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In 2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense…
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So we have Biden, who has gotten in the habit of looking like an absent minded guy, vs Trump, who wants to be your old guy at the barbershop who tells you total falsehood in an authoritarian voice (think Cliff on Cheers or Barney Fife). We have always known that political figures must learn to project an image. FDR had his image. There was Kennedy and Camelot, Nixon and the cloth coat, Obama settling a quarrel over a beer.
What we. Have come to is only making the argument over the image. Time for some issues in the mix.
We have two elderly men competing for the presidency.
One has a four-year record of legislative triumphs but a bumbling personal affect.
The other elderly man presided over four years of chaos, without legislative accomplishment unless you count the 2017 tax cut for corporations and the rich. He leads an angry cult of white supremacists who treat his every word as a command.
Which do you choose?
People are often fooled by the architecture of their brains. For example, speech is continuous, as one can observe by looking at the waves produced on an oscilloscope, but we perceive speech as made up on individual phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and larger components. That’s because the brain automatically handles the significant task of sorting these out of the continuous stream and then presenting the sorted material to consciousness. Similarly, at any instant, we can attend to only about 7 pieces of new information out of potentially billions in the ambient environment. This is a well-studied limitation on short-term memory. Some few of these 7 pieces of information get stored in long-term memory, and when we “remember” something, what happens is that those few pieces are called up by the brain and combined with general information about the world, and a confabulated memory made up of a few stored bits and a lot of that general information is presented to consciousness as the “memory.”
In other words, our overt thinking, action, speech, etc., are strongly influenced by automatic processes at a sub-conscious level–ones we have no control of. Sometimes, there are glitches, and what is delivered to the neural network that governs speech production is not what is intended, but the process happens so quickly that people are not able to recover before the utterance. So, there’s a lot of, “What I meant to say is . . . .”
Linguists often study actual transcriptions of speech. Anyone who has looked at this–at raw transcriptions–knows that they are often barely intelligible because of their tendency to contain a lot of errors, mistakes, confabulations, etc.
Biden has always been prone to such errors, though he has always been quite a bright and knowledgeable guy–lightyears beyond, in both intelligence and knowledge, the Orange Putin Puppet and career criminal and thug and pathological liar Donald Trump.
Precisely so. My wife’s aunt Minnie did this so much that we used to laugh at her lovable “Minnieisms” . Hand me that surrogate knife. It was constant. Substituting sound alike words might actually indicate a peculiar intelligence instead of a problem.
Exactly right, Roy.
When Biden was announced as Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, the press immediately called him “gaffe prone Joe.” The press always seemed somewhat disrespectful towards him. The elderly and overweight are two of few remaining socially acceptable and often defenseless targets of the press and comedians. Obama selected Biden because of his long history and experience in politics and legislature, something Obama did not have. Obama saw him as an asset, or he would not have selected him. The media have long underestimated Biden, but IMO Biden is right to defend himself and his record from those that want to bring him down by trying to damage his credibility.
Biden has been a truly great president. It’s astonishing, really, what he has been able to accomplish despite the Repugnican obstructionists.
Biden’s gaffes are not of consequence.
Rosenberg should write about Garland’s gaffes. Those have consequence.
Excuses were made for Mueller. The bottom line is democracy doesn’t matter sufficiently to either Mueller or Garland. Thank God, Garland wasn’t appointed to SCOTUS and Democrats didn’t advance Republican Mueller to SCOTUS in a show of bi-partisanship.
MAGA does not read the Atlantic. MAGA listens to FOX fake News and other extreme right propaganda sites. They do not read even if they can.
MAGA is easy to manipulate with misinformation and cherry-picked facts or lies.
Traitor Trump will lose the popular vote in 2024 just like he did in 2016 by almost 3,000,000 and 2020 by 8,000,000, but the traitor may still win the Electoral College even if he loses the popular for by 12,000,000 or more. This election is going to be decided by slim margins in 5 to 7 states.
Biden has to convince more people to get out and vote for him, a lot more, by a margin of 15,000,000 or more. Traitor Trump doesn’t have to do that. He just has to keep the people he has in those 5 to 7 states.
In those few states, that will decide the presidential election in 2024, MAGA will be out in force intimidating election workers and BLUE voters. In those few states, this is going to be the dirtiest, most corrupt, expensive, and dangerous election in US History. For many voters and honest election workers, it’s going to take a lot of courage just to vote and do their jobs.
So true. Right wing extremists live in a right wing bubble full of lies and propaganda.
All the “Right Wing MAGAS” have are LIES and PROPAGANDA.” Problem is MAGAs don’t read or think much.
Everyone makes gaffes. I bet no one hear even remembers the ones the Republicans make because the media does not report them as “HERE IS YET ANOTHER SIGN OF THE PROBLEMATIC DECLINING MENTAL STATUS OF THE REPUBLICAN, WHICH IS WHAT WE AT THE NYT HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU FOR MONTHS IN EVERY ARTICLE WE WRITE ABOUT THE REPUBLICAN — SEE, THIS GAFFE PROVES WE SUPERIOR NYT REPORTERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT THAT THE REPUBLICAN HAS SERIOUS COGNITIVE ISSUES”
Just last week on Meet the Press, Mike Johnston confused Iran and Israel during a live interview. Mike Johnson is 52 years old. He also compared himself to Moses.
Can you imagine the “concern trolling” NYT editorials and posts here from “concerned Dems” if Biden had said this:
Rolling Stone Magazine, reporting on a November 28, 2023 by Johnson:
““I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here.” (“Thank you for not allowing the media in,” Johnson added, alleging that journalists have been taking his comments “out of context” with “great joy for the last few weeks.”)
Johnson then revealed that — in the lead up to the “tumult” of Kevin McCarthy losing his gavel and the chaotic GOP process of selecting new Speaker — he had been speaking directly to God. “Look, I’m a Southern Baptist, I don’t wanna get too spooky on you,” he said, provoking some laughter from the attendees. “But, you know, the Lord speaks to your heart.”
The message he received from God, Johnson said, was to prepare for a “Red Sea moment” — both for the Republican conference “and in the country at large.” Johnson said found the directive confusing but he continued to seek the counsel of God.
“The Lord began to wake me up, through this three-week process, in the middle of night to speak to me,” Johnson insisted. “Now at the time,” he continued, “I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses.” But because of his own lesser rank among the GOP’s leadership, Johnson said, he believed the heavenly message to be: “You’re gonna allow me to be Aaron to Moses,” citing the role of the Old Testament prophet’s brother and biblical sidekick.
But then Johnson watched as candidate after candidate failed to generate the necessary Republican support to win the Speakership. “Ultimately 13 people ran for the post. And the Lord kept telling me to, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’” Johnson recalled. “So I waited, I waited. And then at the end … the Lord said, ‘Now step forward.’” Johnson regaled the audience with his surprise to be tapped as the Moses figure: “Me?” Johnson said. “I’m supposed to be Aaron.” But that was not the message, Johnson insisted, recalling: “‘No,’ the Lord said, ‘Step forward.’”
“ELDERLY AND COGNITIVELY SUSPECT BIDEN SAYS HE TALKS TO GOD” would be the subject of 1,000 articles in the so-called liberal media, and 500 posts here from “concerned Democrats”.
PS – Trump also said that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the leader of Turkey. No one at the NYT wrote a think piece about how Republicans fear Trump’s declining mental state because the average Republican doesn’t give them reason to write the story.
Biden’s declining mental state is a story because so many Democrats make it one, as we saw in the knee jerk response here to a outrageously biased report that supposedly “confirmed” that right wing narrative.
Some folks here refused to accept takes other than the one that “the report” by Hur told them was true. That the only reason a guilty Biden wasn’t charged for a crime that the prosecutor had credible evidence Biden committed is because a jury would see an elderly, cognitively challenged man and decide he didn’t know what he was doing.
Even though Pence was not charged for similar crimes and our side KNOWS this, there are too many “concerned Dems” who still can’t help amplifying the right wing false narrative that smears Biden in two ways: Biden is a demented old person who a jury would feel sorry for, and he committed a crime which won’t be prosecuted because he is a demented old person who a jury would feel sorry for.
It’s shocking to see “our side” giving credibility to that false narrative, but this happens again and again. It mystifies me why “our side” is unable to stop amplifying false narratives, and using as an excuse “well no one really reads this blog, so why shouldn’t I amplify false narratives if I want to?”
That’s what we are fighting here. People who are supposed on our side who believe fighting dishonest propaganda is not important, and if they want to simply be purveyors of it and amplify those false narratives on this blog, they should be allowed to do so and anyone who challenges them will be belittled and attacked and must be silenced.
Maybe the same conspiracy theorists who believe that Merrick Garland secretly wants Biden to lose also believe those who amplify the two most damaging (and false) narratives in Hur’s hit-job report secretly want Biden to lose. Or maybe they are all getting played for fools.
Gaffs happen more often when somebody has a language-based learning disability like stuttering. Even if the stuttering was remediated, access to language can sometimes be tricky. The other guy – the opponent, clearly has a language-based learned disability as well – unremediated dyslexic. The man doesn’t read books or briefs. Reading is a skill I want my president to have.
Reading is a skill I want my president to have.
Full Disclosure: An Interview with Noel Casler — NOEL CASLER
Yep. I married into a dyslexic family. When public school failed to teach my kid to read, I was able to put him into a dyslexia school!
My kid can read!
xoxoxox!!!!
There are many ways to teach reading, and generally a combination of these is necessary, and kids differ as standards do not. Bravo that you took the time and effort to find what was right for your kid. Ironically, Mr. One Size Fits All, Bill Gates, is also an exceptional learner because of his autism and is a walking posterboy for the necessity of bending methods to the student.
I tend to be more explicit: While and after children develop phonological awareness skills, learn the alphabetic code of their language and develop fluency, there are many ways to ensure they gain vocabulary and knowledge to ensure reading comprehension.
xoxoxox