And on it went. Biden castigated Republicans for questioning abortion and gay marriage, which he himself did not that long ago. He claimed they spread fear even as his entire spiel felt like it should have been delivered with a flashlight beneath his face. He warned they were making violent threats — yet has any politician so constantly and pathetically threatened to beat people up as Joe Biden? In 2018, he said he would have kicked Donald Trump’s ass in high school. In 2020, he threatened to fight an auto worker from Detroit.
If anything, Biden on Thursday demonstrated only that the culture war is symmetrical, that the rhetoric on both sides has reached an unsustainable pitch. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that he took such tough swings. This is the guy who last year compared Republicans to segregationists like George Wallace and Bull Connor. Any hope he was ever going to unite anyone was long ago drowned out amid his usual volume setting of “drunk auctioneer.”
But then that raises the question: if not to heal our wounds after the Trump years, why would anyone have voted for him? It certainly wasn’t for his razor-sharp policy acumen or youthful good looks. So what then? The main reason Biden was sent to the White House was that voters wanted a little calm and normalcy after a disruptive four years. Now, less than two years after that, he’s all but writing off a good chunk of his fellow countrymen as domestic terrorists. He’s become a combatant in the same political war he was elected to stop.
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