Biden the anti-icon

The president was strikingly disciplined during the most consequential address of his term. Almost to a fault. Few were the flickers of the trademark spontaneity that once made Joe Biden a political powerhouse (and a liability, known for his gaffes). The guy who laughed with Jon Stewart about making up a coal miner ancestor, encouraged the “Uncle Joe” stuff during his vice presidency and billed himself as a “gut politician” seemed not just solemn but stiff during these momentous remarks on the end of his presidential ambitions. Even the movement of his hands felt choreographed. I exhaled in relief when he briefly broke eye contact with the camera to point, with his thumb, at a portrait of Benjamin Franklin behind him. There was just a hint of the Biden we knew — that old Ray-Ban-wearing, cackling ease.

Sure, some of that is attributable to old age. But I’ve been thinking about Biden’s theory of television, as his reluctance to use it has been one of the stranger features of his presidency. Biden isn’t a newcomer to the small screen or to political stagecraft. He cut his teeth on television, and he was good at it. In interviews from the period immediately following his initial election as senator, he seems astonishingly comfortable, assured and far older than his 30 years. He wasn’t camera-shy as vice president. (It’s no coincidence that he did a guest spot on “Parks and Recreation.”) There’s a reason President Donald Trump got himself impeached trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s activities there; he understood that Joe Biden was the greatest threat to his reelection.

One of Biden’s advantages during 2020 — when the pandemic made in-person campaigning trickier — was his ability to channel his personal grief, on television, into the nation’s general despair. That weird, televised Democratic National Convention proved that Biden could connect with people using formats others couldn’t.

It’s striking, therefore, that Biden elected to be a behind-the-scenes president. And that he made TV history by staying off it when he announced he wouldn’t seek a second term, opting instead to publish a written statement. Sure, that decision could have been justified by his illness. (He was sick with covid-19.) But the strangest feature of Wednesday night’s address, which should have been earthshakingly significant, was that it felt tacked-on, an addendum rather than the main event. One of Biden’s more obvious verbal crutches — his tendency to say “anyway” and drift off midsentence, often when he’s making a point about his legacy — feels like it might represent, in microcosm, a more general tendency to limit the public’s exposure to his decision to step down. That can’t help but mute the effect.

In journalistic terms, it felt like the president had scooped himself.

The debate over Biden’s legacy will be long and spirited, but my main impression, watching Biden Wednesday night — and it’s a thought I’ve had before, despite having no illusions about any career politicians’ essential narcissism — is that the man gets bored talking about his own achievements. Anytime Biden starts listing his administration’s wins, you can practically watch him glaze over. I don’t think that’s the main reason he’s had so much trouble making a case for his second term during this electoral season, but I do think the man had a built-in advantage when his job required him to talk about national grief rather than national prosperity.

On paper, the president hit all the right notes. His many appeals to history were pointed and germane: “George Washington showed us presidents are not kings,” he said, in one of several references to Trump’s undisguised fondness for authoritarianism. His frequent reminders to the public that the power to determine the nation’s future rests with them were moving if a tad, well, rote. (The same can’t be said for his extremely surprising announcement that he intends to reform the Supreme Court during his remaining months in office.)

Whatever the reasons, Biden ended his political career with an address that wasn’t as sad as it could have been — or as rousing or dramatic. Many of the president’s recent stumbles, including his disastrous debate performance last month, have stemmed from circumstances outside his control. But the temperate, low-key tenor of his appeal Wednesday night feels deliberate. Crafted. Maybe that’s a stage of life. Or maybe, given his opponent’s destructive thirst for attention at any price, it represents the culmination of a belated but considered rejection of the histrionics required to be an icon, rather than a president.