Authentic talk

Joe Biden talks like a human being. He is just fine. 

Democrats should relax. Better yet, enjoy Biden's speech for the positive that it is. 

It is proof that he is still authentic: a "regular Joe." It inoculates him from looking like the consummate DC insider.

Trump is mocked by his opponents for his un-presidential extemporaneous speech. Democrats and the media chortle over the typo "confefe."  What a dope!

Trump's insulters have it wrong. It backfires. Everyone makes typos. No one likes being teased for them. Trump's natural speech is, in fact, an implicit counter-attack against elitism, correctness, condescension, and the dishonesty of politician-speak. It is a positive for Trump. Republican voters disagree about policy on race, immigration, taxes, trickle down, deficits, immigration, and mask-wearing. 

They don't disagree on disliking Democratic contempt from what they perceive as PC cultural elites. That is the common denominator safe harbor. Hate Hillary.

Biden's speech--even his supposed gaffes--are a positive for Biden. After all, Biden is undeniably a lifelong DC politician. Nothing would be more predictable for him than to speak with the accomplished fluency of 45 years, saying well practiced, well massaged phrases and sentences that glide smoothly through political minefields. (Hillary Clinton did that. People hated her for it. She seemed phony, like a politician, deep in the swamp.)

Biden is under attack by Trump and GOP allies for his manner of extemporaneous speech. It is a part of the campaign narrative of "Sleepy Joe," the guy too old and addled and demented to be president, as evidenced by his disjointed speech. The mainstream media assists that narrative by looking for "gaffes." (As I wrote this summer, after listening closely to Biden, Kamala Harris and Rhodes Scholar Cory Booker in back to back campaign events, Biden was the one with no slips of the tongue while Harris and Booker both made them. With Harris and Booker, no one in the mainstream media noticed or cared or wrote about them.)

Karl Rove wrote a piece of GOP on-message snark, commenting on Biden's conversation with "Charlamagne Tha God." Joe Biden, he said, "often speaks as if English were his second language."

Ha-ha.

He thought to prove his point to Wall Street Journal readers by quoting Biden at length. "I'd be very worried about those transcripts if I were the Biden campaign," Rove said.

Heads up to readers: transcripts often look oddly ungrammatical, and indeed downright weird. The printed word has expectations of full sentences with subordinate clauses, noun, verb, prepositional phrases, then a full stop period. Then next sentence.  

That is how written speeches that are read sound. Those speeches are boring to watch and hear. They seem formal and phony. They don't sound like natural speech.

Here is what Rove quoted, expecting Wall Street Journal readers to think it laughable.

Biden:

     "What would I say? Remember when I said Biden can’t win? The primaries? I kicked everybody’s ass. Excuse me. I won overwhelming. I told you when I got to South Carolina, I won every single county. I won a larger share of the black vote than anybody has, including Barack. I increased the vote in Virginia overwhelmingly by 70 percent. 

Look, what people don’t know about me is I come from a state has the eighth-largest black population in America—the eighth-largest. I get 96 percent of that vote for the last 40 years. They’re the folks, as they say out my way, brung me to the dance. That’s how I got elected every single time and everybody’s shocked. I get overwhelming support from the black leadership, young and old. Every poll shows me way ahead and it’s not just—I hear this, ‘Oh yeah, old blacks are with Biden, but young aren’t.’ 

Look at the polling data. Polling data, let’s say it’s off by half. Come on, man. Give me a little break here."



Take a moment. 

Possibly a reader of this blog reads that silently and thinks "disjointed" and therefore accepts the Karl Rove-Trump premise, but take a second moment. Pretend you are an actor reading lines aloud, perhaps in a casting audition, with the expressions one would expect if one were playing the role of Biden. Try it. It doesn't sound odd. You can hear the indignation, the passion, the vitality. It sounds natural. As you voice the words as Biden spoke them, he sounds just fine.

Joe, talking like that, is inoculation against the real threat to the branding of Joe Biden as the alternative to Trump. Biden is, in fact, an insider. He is undeniably part of the establishment. That is a positive for Biden, but also a negative, if he can be described as another Hillary Clinton. Trump want to run against Hillary and her presumed pals. Biden confounds that. Trump is president but he still comes across at the guy on the outside getting beat up by the Ivy League snobby, politically correct, mask-wearing, NASCAR-hating DC insiders and fake news elitists.

Joe Biden not look or sound like an elitist.  He sounds like the sort of person those people at, the inarticulate Joe Biden. That is the perfect place for Joe to be.

Gaffe on.