I was in my car yesterday, and I turned on the news. President Biden was giving a speech about Syria, and I paused to listen to a little of it. It was a perfectly normal speech, the kind one would expect from a president with many years of foreign policy experience. When it was over, I went back to listening to music and I didn't think much about the speech. But when I got home, I turned on my TV and watched an excerpt of it. And I had an entirely different impression. No, there was nothing wrong with the speech; as I said, it was the kind that presidents often give after some big event in the world has taken place. But my attention was no longer focused on listening to the speech: it was focused on how the speaker looked. And the speech that sounded fine on radio seemed a bit more halting when I saw it on TV. I know President Biden has a stutter and I know how hard he works to pronounce words that are difficult. As I watched him, it seemed to me that he was putting a lot of effort into speaking understandably. And whether I was supposed to or not, I felt bad for him.
It reminded me of what the famous communication theorist Marshall McLuhan had said about "the medium is the message." In other words, each mass medium impacts, or even alters, the way we receive the message. Consider the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. John F. Kennedy was youthful, conversational, and confident on TV; his opponent, Richard Nixon, looked ill-at-ease, sweaty, and very very uncomfortable. All of us who saw the debate were convinced Kennedy had won easily. But people who listened to the debate on radio, or read the transcript in their favorite newspaper, came away with an entirely different impression-- they believed Nixon sounded more in command on the facts and they believed he surely was the winner. It was perhaps the first tangible example of how the medium of television created an entirely different perception of the candidates from how they were perceived through radio or print.
Joe Biden is not a television president. He has always been an awkward speaker, prone to gaffes, with a tendency to say the wrong thing even when he knows the topic and knows what he is trying to say. He has a very friendly smile, and can be really personable, but he does not seem like he enjoys being on camera as much as he enjoys one-on-one communication with voters or speaking in a place where he knows everyone. Unlike Donald Trump, who has a background in the entertainment industry and a larger-than-life persona that he has utilized for years, Mr. Biden is neither an entertainer nor a performer. He's an old-school politician trying to fit into an era where policy positions don't seem to matter, and constructing an exciting image is everything. It's a world where many people get their information from online sources (which are often partisan and seldom fact-checked), and where our politics often resembles professional wrestling.
That's why I was one of many folks who believed Mr. Biden should never have run for re-election. I know he had some very important accomplishments, and I know he wanted to run on them, but his opponent was a master of our media environment. Donald Trump knew how to capture the news cycle, dominate the conversation, outrage his detractors and inspire his supporters. Joe Biden, nice guy though he was, didn't seem able to do any of those things. Plus, fairly or not, in a visual media universe, he just... looked... old. It wasn't about his chronological age-- I know many people in their early 80s, including some in congress, who are vibrant and articulate. Often, Mr. Biden seemed neither. And since perception is reality, what people perceived was that he wasn't up to the task.
I wish I had a time machine, that could transport Joe Biden back to the 1970s or 1980s, before people's attention spans got even shorter, before expectations were changed by the internet and social media, back when policies and accomplishments were what voters cared about, and a candidate who cursed or made vulgar remarks at a rally would never have been allowed to continue in politics, let alone get elected president. But while I sincerely believe Joe Biden got a lot done and deserves our thanks, what we needed him to do was something that wasn't within his skill-set. His advisors should have told him the truth. (Or maybe they did, but he refused to believe it.) I can't put all the blame on Mr. Biden, nor on Kamala Harris-- after all, it was the voters who chose Donald Trump, the guy who was more exciting and more outrageous, whether he was qualified for the job or not. So, here we are, awaiting the next episode of the Trump Show, not knowing what might come next. But his supporters aren't worried: they're sure that whatever happens, it's guaranteed to be entertaining.
