Does No One Remember Joseph Biden's "Record-Player Moment?"

Back in September 2019 during the Democratic Party's presidential primary, in a debate among the candidates, Joseph Biden responded to a question about the effects of segregation with an incoherent string of remarks apparently to do with improving the education of young children in which he repeatedly yelled "School!" in the tone of a Frankenstein's monster. What got more attention than that, however, was the reference Biden made to the necessity of parents having the "record player" on so that their children could hear more words and thus enlarge their vocabularies.

At the time many already thought that Mr. Biden was "too old" for the presidency--not merely at a point in his life at which the odds of his still being of sufficiently sound mind and body five or ten years on to bear up under the responsibilities of the job were (few candidates aim to be one-termers) were increasingly open to doubt, but whether he was already becoming unsound that way, to say nothing of "being out of touch." And some thought that he would never recover from the "gaffe." That people would always remember Biden's response in that moment.

As it happens, amid the media's coverage of a Biden performance at the latest Biden-Trump spectacle that by all accounts was a disaster so great that the most Establishment organs are in despair over Biden's chances and calling upon him to give up the race and permit his place in the race to be taken by a more viable contender, I failed to find a single reference to his "record-player moment" in the press.

One can argue that this has been a matter of effective damage control carried out in the aftermath of the episode, as a Democratic Party leadership once again determined to get a reliable old centrist-neoliberal on the ticket even though this had cost them again and again over the years ultimately succeeded in warding off the challenges to Biden on the grounds of age, just as it had on the grounds of his centrism, and in the circumstances succeeded (as often it did not) in getting much of the public to "hold their nose and vote" for him. One can also argue that the "record-player moment" was buried under a pile of other gaffes (Biden was never thought brilliant even at the peak of his powers, or for that matter, honest or humble about his limitations) amid a general degradation of public discourse, which along with the "interesting times" in which we have apparently been cursed to live made any one of them simply seem less important.

However, it also seems to me to be the case that the vast majority of those who produce our "journalism," displaying signs of what they accuse Biden of much earlier in life, have no ability to recall anything that happened more than two weeks ago, let alone reference that knowledge in such a way as to help them illuminate the present. It also seems to me that even if they had the capacity to make and use such recollections this particular one would be inconvenient--suggesting that those who argued that Biden was unsuited to the nomination because of his condition were correct. After all, the way things work in our media is that the Establishment and its experts are never held accountable for being wrong.

By the same token those who challenge the Establishment are never given credit for being right, even though they are that about as often as the Establishment is wrong--which seems pretty much all the time these days.