I Had A Dream Last Night

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Greetings from London, where the Sanity clan will gather this year at the home of Sanity Princess—minus Tito’s, which is not sold here, but well-stocked with other spirits and stoked for pub crawling, book-store browsing, footie (Go Arsenal!), and massive doses of good cheer. (Oxford comma, intentional.) So I’m going to try to limit my news-slinging for a week, and will probably fail because, hey, I’m addicted. But let me tell you about a dream I had last night…

It is 2021. Joe Biden has just been elected President. Inflation is soaring—and the dynamic, creative Biden of my dreams has an idea: he’s going to the supermarket. He’s going to the supermarket every week to monitor the prices. “Oh mother of God! Look at this: eggs are up another dime this week!” He says in the dairy aisle. “And lamb: $17 a pound, where do they ship it from—China? Oh wait, here’s a bargain in the cereal aisle…except, honey they shrunk the box!”

Imagine that. It might have had multiple effects: It would have put the President on the same page as the public when it came to inflation. It would have shown Biden’s best side, his everyman side: “Mary Blessed Mother of God, $1 for a can of coke? Lord save us!” It might have put some price pressure on the corporate behemoths who deliver our food and took advantage of the situation. And on a deeper level, it would have sent the message that inflation was a secular phenomenon beyond politics, a consequence of the supply chain muckups of the Covid era, beyond the control of the President. He would have become a sympathetic figure, a member of the family. Dad might go shopping and find a better price for butter than Joe: “Honey, the President needs to try Costco!” But then, the Biden of my dreams would have gone wild when he hit the big-box stores. “Wow, I can buy 50 rolls of the hefty picker-upper for only….” He would have been a sympathetic presence in our lives, as opposed to the ghost he quickly became.

The modern presidency is more about performance than it is about legislation. Biden was great at the latter, but look where it got him. And his inability to ingratiate himself as a public figure quickly raised questions: Was he too old to go shopping? We know now—at least, we’re beginning to find out—that his staff kept him closeted for fear of…what? Gaffes? Or something worse? We are beginning to get the vague outlines of the Biden diminution in splendid reporting like this, from the Wall Street Journal. But what if that’s only the tip of the iceberg? What if Biden is suffering from a condition that is chronic and degenerative?

On the morning after the June debate debacle, I received several calls from doctors and friends, all with the same message: Biden’s got Parkinsons disease. “He’s got the mask,” an old friend nursing her spouse told me. “He looks like my husband.”

These sorts of rumors clotted the ether. Everyone I knew in the media business heard them, but—responsibly—didn’t report them because we didn’t know for sure and there was no way to find out. There was no way to find out because Biden’s staff kept him hidden, which amputated the most important aspect of the presidency: public performance, which stands at the heart of leadership. And so there was a stark passivity, and lack of spontaneity, to the Biden Administration: I am still amazed that no one got fired. I’ve watched every Administration since Nixon and someone always got fired. You select a Cabinet and not every official turns out to be suited for these most difficult of jobs. A chief of staff is, historically, a wisp in the wind.

The striking thing was how un-Joe-like this antiproactivity has been: I have taken the train from DC to Wilmington with him and then dined at his favorite red-sauce Italian restaurant, and it was thrilling how garrulous and social he was. To a fault, at times—but having too much time for the people was a Biden strength. He’s been a mummy in the White House…and you’ve got to figure that something difficult, perhaps terrible, has been going on. And if something has been—if it turns out that Biden was suffering from some sort of degenerative disease, and his staff did nothing about it, that would be a major scandal and a disgrace. Everyone from Dr. Jill to Ron Klain to Mike Donilon to Karin St. Pierre will stand ugly in history. And if they merely advised him to stay out of the public eye for more banal, political reasons, they will also stand ugly in history.

This overprotection, the overcoaching, overmassaging of politicians seems a particularly Democratic problem, especially in the Age of Trump, when the populist crudeness of the Republican candidate seemed, to all too many people, a breath of fresh air. The Dems breathed the stuffy, artificial air of the focus-group; not even the complimentary Snickers and popcorn could cover over the phoniness of the operation. So here’s the Dems: always “fighting” for “working people”—but really, they never did—and the “undocumented” and the “LGBLT+mayo” (or whatever they are this week) and “people of color”—that dodgy, reverse elusion of what my grandmother called colored people. (The NAACP never renamed itself the NAAPC.) If the 2024 election told us anything, it’s that increasing numbers of “people of color” want to be considered, well, just…people, unhyphenated.

The Democrats, thus, have become the party of euphemism. America is a more brazen, direct place than that. And it is only a short hop from the consultants advising Democratic pols not to use the real words to Biden’s aides not telling the truth about the health of our President.

The last few years have been sad, watching Joe Biden—an athletic guy—stumbling across the South Lawn to the helicopter, staggering into and out of sentences. In the past year, my sadness has slouched toward anger. And his legacy has been damaged—unfairly, perhaps, but permanently. There will be the legislative legacy, and the solid diplomatic work, keeping us out of wars, but Biden will also be remembered for his public stiffness and passivity—and the question: In his case, did the Mask of Power conceal only catatonia? His utter disappearance these past few months, the premature ascent of Donald Trump to de facto President, has put an exclamation point on it. I think of the vibrant, verbose Biden, friendly to the point of goofiness, I used to know and I think: what a tragedy to finally achieve his lifelong dream and have it end this way.

But there is a lesson here: Unless the Dems find a candidate who can go shopping like a citizen, and use the vernacular of the people, and get pissed off—or show other inconvenient emotions—like a real person, all attempts to remake the party will be futile. Unless they can find a leader who can effortlessly show strength and has a sense of humor and courage and empathy, they will spend many years in the desert.

It’s been a drastic year. You Sanity people have been a splendid community. I’ve learned lots from your comments. So if you have friends or family who might be creatively annoyed by this newsletter, give them a gift subscription here: