Election Countdown, 264 Days to Go: Fuzzy Talk About ‘Fuzzy Memory’
There's still a chance for the press to sharpen up. A good time to start would be now.
From the famed ‘New York Times Pitchbot’ parody account, a screenshot of Chris Wallace’s CNN panel discussion four days ago.
Every field of life has its “lumpers” and “splitters.” Lumpers put things into big groups, based on similarities. Splitters sub-divide them, based on differences. For instance: linguists note the traits that link German and English in the same language family. Students flailing through German 101 say, Are you kidding?
Obviously in real life you need both perspectives: Seeing the patterns, noting the variations. By nature I’m a lumper—nearly everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve lived through or read about. But in this post I’ll play the part of a splitter.
My purpose is to point out some distinctions that have been lost in the past week’s swirl over Joe Biden’s age, and that need to be rediscovered. I have five of them.
1) Forgetting vs. forgetting.
This is the distinction introduced by Dr. Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist at UC Davis, in an op-ed in the NYT three days ago. His essay was on the difference between forgetting—the slips of the tongue that everyone makes, plus the delay in recalling arbitrary names and details that increases with age—and what he called Forgetting, or the truly consequential loss of awareness and orientation.
His further point is that the recent frenzy about Joe Biden’s memory was based on a one-two punch. First, gratuitous snark in the report from Robert Hur1. Then, Biden’s “forgetful” flub of saying “Mexico” rather than “Egypt.” But none of this, in Ranganath’s view, involved “Forgetting” on the consequential scale. He pointed out that Biden is 81—but so are Paul McCartney, Martin Scorsese, and Harrison Ford, “considered to be at the top of their professions.” Warren Buffett is 93. He added that “rather than focus on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job”:
Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation—both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age—are likely to be of equal or greater importance.
That is: a neuroscientist is telling us what to look for, and saying it’s not what has gotten most of the coverage. These distinctions lead to the next ones.
[Update: As mentioned in the first footnote below, Biden’s two multi-hour interviews with Robert Hur took place on October 8 and 9 of last year. That is, immediately after the October 7 Hamas terror attack, which would have claimed most of Biden’s attention.]
2) Slow dance vs. break-dance: The rhythms of eloquence.
People reveal their depths and talents at different rhythms. Some seem magically gifted with the instant quip or comeback. People like this do well as improv comics, appellate lawyers, talk-show hosts. Others take their time about expressing themselves. I recently wrote about my late mentor Charles Peters. In conversation he could sometimes sit silent for a minute or so before responding. He was terrible as a radio-show guest, but through his 90s remained one of the wisest people I have known.
Joe Biden has spent so much of his career being labelled a “gaffe machine” that it may come as a surprise that he can be remarkably eloquent, in the right setting and at the right rhythm.
The pattern that predicts his performance is: the longer and less hurried the discussion, the better Biden does. I’m not talking about the early-Biden tendency to rattle on endlessly. I mean a sequence like the following, from the longest formats down to the shortest, and how Biden does in each:
His four-speech sequence of major addresses on the fate of democracy, delivered over the past two years, stands up among presidential rhetoric.2 The connected arguments are well conceived, as a sequence; the speeches are skillfully developed, paragraph by paragraph; and Biden’s delivery has been good, forceful but not overdone. Yes, Biden has writers and coaches to help him. But these productions finally rise or fall depending on the speaker. Believe me, I know.
State of the Union addresses often drone on. Biden’s have been better, tighter, more pointed than most. I wrote about the one last year.
In Q-and-A interviews that have any breathing space—podcast-scale, rather than soundbite—Biden reveals things he knows, rather than a name he has mixed up. I highly recommend this 20-minute YouTube of John Harwood’s interview with Biden last fall. Biden talks about Supreme Court ethics, about the MAGA era, about immigration, with humor and ease.
Then we come to the short-burst, yelling-dominated “press availabilities,” where Biden seems his tensest, most stutter-conscious, and most error-prone.
Implication one: More people, including reporters, should check out some of Biden’s big speeches, or watch this Harwood interview. They show more of the man behind the gaffe. Implication two: Biden needs to do more of these longer sessions, including “real” press conferences that aren’t just yell-fests.
And implication three: Maybe even for the yell-fests, Biden should try to re-set the rhythm to the one he’s best at. In a press scrum, everyone is shouting and trying to get questions out fast. It’s natural to take the bait and answer back at the same pace. Instead Biden could summon his inner Charlie Peters: Take command of the time, pause (for a matter of seconds, not Charlie’s full minute), and present what he wants to say, at the pace he wants to say it.
3) Doing the job vs. getting the job.
Let’s go back to Charan Ranganath and his reminder that “superficial factors” aren’t reliable measures of skill on the job.
The problem is that in politics, what’s “superficial”—looks, snappy delivery, impressions of quickness and speed—has always played a big part in getting the job. One of many great films to endure from the sour US culture of the 1970s was The Candidate, starring Robert Redford.3 Its theme was that a charismatic pretty-boy could charm his way into office—and have no idea what to do once there. In its famous final scene, as reporters are thronging for post-victory interviews, the Redford-candidate turns to his grizzled campaign manager and plaintively asks, “What do we do now?”
Here’s the relevance to Biden and Trump. As far as I can tell, none of the evidence about Biden’s supposed decline involves what he has done as president. We don’t hear that he’s uninterested during briefings, impatient with details, making decisions in a huff or on a whim.
The complaints have been strictly about the “outside” parts of the job—how he looks and sounds, whether he can “message” or inspire. And whether a resulting weakness as a candidate will drag his party (and the country) to doom. As my friend Walter Shapiro put it recently, in a piece that is more merciless toward Biden than I would be:
The issue, alas, is not how effectively Biden has governed but rather how the octogenarian president will come across as a candidate against Trump over the next nine months.
That’s a major question. But awareness of this distinction—doing the job, vs getting elected to the job—would be useful in framing pieces on the “age issue” as being about political perceptions, not about the fate of the world resting in trembling hands.
And it moves to the next distinction…
4) Realities vs. perceptions, in framing the news.
The central rationale for the press’s wall-to-wall emphasis on “the age issue” is that they’re responding to popular interest and demand. I’m sure this is partly true. But it is impossible to ignore the way leading outlets have been spring-loaded to use news about Biden as a peg to talk about age.