This Is No Longer Remotely Tenable

I watched Biden’s NAACP speech so you don’t have to, unless you did, in which case I am so sorry

I’m going to try to stay away from this election, because writing about politics is not my forte, and because a million people do it better.

But I made the mistake of listening to President Biden give a speech to the annual convention of the NAACP yesterday. First I caught the last part of it live; then, after ranting on Twitter a bit about what I’d witnessed (I’m backsliding tremendously, Twitter-wise, thanks to this goddamn election), I started over from the beginning.

Then I tried to transcribe the bits where Biden had the most trouble speaking. It was a challenge. At one point the president said, “We have to stand against the violence and intimidation of white supremacy, the murder, innocent lives in that grocery store in Buffalo, New York, when I went up there.” At another, he said, “As Harry Truman said, ‘I’ve never delivered g-given anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.’ ” Not sure where ‘delivered’ came from but the actual quote is “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”

A couple times, he seemed to get lost mid-utterance, start to say something else, and then try to pick up where he left off: discussing Trump, Biden said “His mismanagement of the pandemic was especially devastating to black communities — oh, I know, becau — and other countries, other communities of color.” Sometimes you could sort of understand what he was saying, policy-wise, but if you took the words at face value they didn’t make sense: “My city Wilmington, Delaware, I-95 runs up through what used to be the black community, divided it, six lanes wide. We’re gonna make sure that the states want it, we’re gonna be able to pave over the top of that and still have the highway — connecting neighborhoods!” (If the punctuation seems weird, that’s because I’m trying to remain faithful to the rhythm with which he delivered these remarks.)

Because of his trouble speaking, here and there he seemed to invent new words. “And because of you,” he said at one point, “we’re not only prodeckting Obamacare, you allowed me to increase it, making healthcare more affordable, for putting — and by the way, more than it’s ever been, more than it’s ever been — millions of African Americans have now had healthcare because of what we’ve done.” Toward the end, attempting to quote the Bible, he said “the palms tells [sic] us” instead of “the psalms tell us,” which reminded me a bit of his multiple mentions of “the battle box” rather than “the ballot box” the other day.

At one point he mentioned how his student loan and homeownership policies benefited “black borrowers,” and he told a story that honestly sounded like one of Donald Trump’s yarns:

I don’t know how many have called me to say, “Mr. President” — or got, I’ve gotten phone numbers and called them back — “Mr. President, thank you. I couldn’t get married. My debt was so large. I couldn’t have children. I couldn’t think” — no, I’m serious, you know it — “I couldn’t buy a home. But what you did, you freed me of my debt and, and you gave me ten thousand bucks for a down payment on a home.”

More than once, Biden — I almost typed ‘Trump’ there! — trailed off and then, when he couldn’t remember where he was going, said ‘anyway’ and pivoted to something else.

The nadir came when Biden attempted to pitch a newly announced housing proposal: among other things, according to the White House, the Biden administration is “Calling on Congress to pass legislation giving corporate landlords a choice to either cap rent increases on existing units at 5% or risk losing current valuable federal tax breaks[.]”