Biden: "Are You Not Entertained?"

No.

With Joe Biden bowing out of the 2024 race today, I’m going to take one more shot before letting vanish into the mists of history the conundrum of why both supporters and opponents of Biden never seemed to notice that he was the second most Trumpian politician.

For example, during a Democratic candidates’ debate in 2007, Joe Biden accused the black community of being in denial about being on the down-low, annoyed Barack Obama by hinting that his rival had needed to get an AIDS test, and explained that the innocent reason he got an AIDS test was because he had gotten 13 pints of blood in a transfusion, and, presumably, you never know what kind of gay needle junkie might be selling his blood.

SEN. BIDEN: … I spent last summer going through the black sections of my town, holding rallies in parks, trying to get black men to understand it is not unmanly to wear a condom, getting women to understand they can say no, getting people in the position where testing matters. I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack got tested for AIDS. (Laughter.) There's no shame in being tested for AIDS. It's an important thing.

Because the fact of the matter is, in the community, in the communities engaged in denial, they're engaged in denial, no one wants to talk about it in the community, and we do not have enough leaders, in the community and outside the community, demanding we face the reality, confront the men in the community, as well as the women, letting them know there are alternatives. (Applause.)

MR. SMILEY: Thank you.

SEN. OBAMA: Tavis, Tavis, Tavis, I just got to make clear -- I got tested with Michelle. (Laughter, applause.)

MR. SMILEY: Ah.

SEN. OBAMA: In -- when we were in Kenya in Africa. So I want to --

MR. SMILEY: All right.

SEN. OBAMA: I don't want any confusion here about what's going on. (Applause continues.)

MR. SMILEY: All right.

SEN. BIDEN: And I got tested to save my life, because I had 13 pints of blood transfusion.

SEN. OBAMA: I was tested with my wife.

Objectively, that’s pretty entertaining by Presidential standards.

And yet very few seem to find Joe entertaining, especially not in this century, particularly not compared to Trump.

Leaving aside Biden’s present decrepitude, how come?

In contrast, a large fraction of the public finds Trump hilarious while another large fraction finds him appalling.

And yet Joe’s basically another crass blowhard, much like Trump.

I imagine there are old-timers in Delaware who have been voting for or against Biden forever who find him fun, but few in the rest of the country noticed his Trumpian aspects.

One possibility is that the white part of Democratic Party has been getting ever more genteel since Joe was first elected to the Senate in 1972. Perhaps the Biden style that must have gone over well with the beefy guys in windbreakers down at the union hall in 1972 came to seem increasingly déclassé and cringe to new generations of white Democrats and journalists.

But, then, from 2008 he became the the third most important subject of coverage, after Barack and Michelle, in the media’s project to sanctify the Obama Administration and reduce all criticism of it to racism.

Joe, of course, has a bumptious but insecure ego didn’t fit in well with the increasingly Olympian depiction of the Democrats that the media embarked upon in 2008.

Hence, on the campaign trail in 1988 he announced, “I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”

Nor did his history of plagiarism, both at law school and when running in 1988, didn’t fit in well.

And then there was all his politically incorrect noticing, such as pointing out that Jews control the media, and then rescuing himself at the last moment by explaining that that’s a Good Thing because otherwise we wouldn’t have gay marriage.

And, finally, his love for all his punched up personal anecdotes, like his uncle being eaten by South Sea cannibals.

In the new Democratic Party, Joe was an embarrassment, so nobody in the media was allowed to point out that this stuff was colorful. A good media apparatchik would just sweep it under the rug and change the subject.

Or that’s my theory. What’s your’s?