Stephen Green is confident that Joe Biden will make it through Thursday's State of the Union speech with minimal gaffes. Green thinks it's because Biden's doctors have him ramped up on drugs, à la John F. Kennedy.
Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. Joe Biden was making gaffes when he was in his 50s, so it shouldn't surprise us if he has a brain cramp or two during the speech.
Biden's 2024 strategy hearkens back to his basement strategy of 2020. Only this time, he has the entire apparatus of the White House to shield him. Secret Service agents can be very persuasive, and loyal White House aides play upon the desire of White House reporters to maintain access. Those reporters know that any mention of a Biden gaffe will send them off to Siberia (or the Treasury Department beat).
But for more than an hour, Biden will be an emperor with few clothes and nothing to shield him from his proclivity to screw up. Democratic lawmakers will try. No doubt after the speech, we'll hear that Biden's State of the Union was interrupted by applause "X" number of times — a record, or close to it. And the media will make sure to exclaim many times how well Biden looks, how amazing he acts for someone of his advanced years.
They've never seen anything like it, and Biden performed so well that you just have to ask why anyone could ever possibly think Biden is not capable of being president.
Silly us.
The prophylactic approach extends to the president's own health, at least as publicly disclosed. Despite exhibiting signs of deterioration so obvious that even late-night comedians are starting to acknowledge it, Biden, amazingly, was not subjected during his annual medical exam last week to the kind of routine cognitive test that senior citizens with his memory profile (including Donald Trump) frequently undergo. I have watched a loved one take that test, and I can testify that a wrong answer to some of the questions, if widely shared, has the potential to sink an entire presidential campaign.
All of which accelerates a pre-existing trend that leads us to the next Biden State of the Union historical outlier: In the past eight decades of Gallup measuring presidential public approval, there has never been an incumbent in a re-election year to poll so abysmally before the big speech. Prior to this year, the record net disapproval rating for any such president was George H.W. Bush's -2 percentage points in January 1992 (46 percent positive, 48 percent negative).
Biden? He's clocking in at -21:
Don't expect Republicans to call out Biden for his numerous and blatant lies. That's because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told the GOP House caucus not to heckle the president or try to interrupt his speech at any time.
“He just said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum,’” a third GOP lawmaker told The Hill. “We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming. I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”
Johnson is concerned about the same thing that Special Counsel Robert Hur was worried about as far as bringing Biden to trial. A lot of older voters will see yelling at the president as piling on a kindly old man with memory problems.
It remains to be seen whether Biden's allies in the media, in Congress, and in the "spin room" afterward can salvage the president's chances.
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