Biden is no old Irish hero
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-07-30)
President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. Evan Vucci/AP Pool
Making Irish boring was a feature of the Irish educational system, rather than a bug. Learning Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (or Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne), the epic retelling of a love triangle between the aging warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, his loyal follower Diarmaid, and the beautiful and wily Gráinne, should have ensured rapt teenage attention with its tales of illicit sex and bloodthirsty feuds. Yet, I was bored senseless by the focus on grammar and pronunciation, with the wild language tamed into anaemic English approximations. I remembered thinking, as I stared out the window of Mrs. Mahon’s Irish class in Gortnor Abbey, why didn’t old Fionn just let the young lovers be? Why risk all your accomplishments in an obsessive pursuit of a young woman who found you too old and wanted a younger lover?
I thought of the elderly Fionn again last Wednesday, as Biden ended his steadfast refusal to give up chasing his second term as President of the United States. The heavy makeup aged him further, but he remained defiant in an immaculate navy suit jacket, crisp white shirt, and deep blue tie. Speaking softly, quickly, his words tumbled out into run-on sentences, almost racing against the clock to list all the achievements of his presidency. This wasn’t a leader who had accepted the inevitability of his defeat in the upcoming election. Not even close. Addressing the American nation from behind the Resolute desk in the iconic Oval Office, Joe Biden wanted his enemies, but more especially his friends, to know that he had a second term in him and would have beaten Donald Trump come November. While his predecessor would not accept losing the 2020 election, the forty-sixth President of the United States willingly (if understandably reluctantly) relinquished his second-term claim to the office, and everything changed.
Referencing Trump’s existential threat to democracy, Biden emphatically confirmed he had withdrawn as the presumptive Democrat Party nominee the previous Sunday, in favour of his vice-president Kamala Harris, to make place for “new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.” The real reason he resigned was left unsaid. Faced with a party that had lost faith in his ability to successfully defeat his Republican rival but could not force him aside, the oldest president ever to sit in the White House did something extraordinary and ended his bid for another four-year term. For the 81-year-old Biden, “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.” He put his country above himself, in stark contrast to Trump, who was reported to have avoided a cemetery visit outside Paris in 2018 to commemorate the dead American soldiers interred within because “It’s filled with losers” and he didn’t want to get his hair wet. [1]
Since Biden’s announcement, Kamala Harris and her team have expertly seized the momentum, matched with the general relief of Democrats and never-Trumpers to see a vibrant, articulate, and consummate opponent to the once inevitable Trump second term. It is a palpable shift, which, though in very early days, is beginning to feel like Barack Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ hope-filled campaign of 2008. My liberal friends, who were crushed following Biden’s disastrous CNN debate, are slowly feeling into the light, still hedging their bets as to what could go wrong – like an auld mountain farmer giving the go-ahead for the silage bailer to come on Tuesday next, but avoiding more talk of dry weather between now and then — lest it draw the rain down on the lot of it.
I first arrived in Los Angeles as posters for Obama were being stuck to anything that could take one. There are some striking visual campaign similarities between 2008 Obama and Harris of 2024. Both are opposed by old white men with detrimental vice-president nominee choices. John McCain had later regretted picking the oft-lampooned Sarah Palin. Trump selected J.D. Vance, a marine veteran, Yale school graduate, and author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy. Yet Vance adds little to nothing to the Republican ticket, with Trump appearing to have only picked the new Ohio senator (elected last year) on the insistence of his sons Don Jnr and Eric. In fact, aside from having the charisma of a potato, Vance’s extolling of hardline positions such as denying childless adults voting rights (yes, he said that to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in a ‘thought experiment’) and extending abortion bans to rape victims, will be a burden on Trump, who needs independents and at least some sane people to vote for him.
Don Jnr could claim bad luck in his timing, as Republicans clearly believed that Biden was not going to step back from the race and were becoming complacently drunk on the polls signalling the imminency of a second Trump term. Kamala Harris has caused consternation for her opponents, who are still struggling to come up with a coherent response, verging between outright racist and misogynistic verbal barbs, to daft threats of legal action to prevent her nomination. But they will eventually get their act together as polls say it’s too close to call and is likely to remain so in the weeks ahead.
The Democrats have their convention ahead in Chicago from August 19 to 22 and will work to make it as exciting and momentum-building as during the ‘Yes We Can’ years. Harris will also have to select her vice-president choice and will likely defer to wiser heads than Trump’s two weird sons. Bringing on board a seasoned and popular politician from a swing state can only be the obvious decision – with the Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, probably one of the favourites considering his state is vital to Harris’s success and where Trump is currently leading in polls.
But as the mountain farmer knows to his own cost, it is never advisable to be too hopeful – at least in weather and politics. While many Republicans are trying to hold their collective noses in voting for Trump, progressives in the Democratic grassroots are furious with the official government response to the ongoing war in Gaza, seeing the administration of both Biden and Harris as complicit in Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. Even if a peace deal is agreed upon soon, the tens of thousands of innocent dead and injured, with destroyed infrastructure and a fractured local society, will challenge the moral authority of any incoming administration, whose American war machine supplies the Israeli army. Voter turnout, especially in those swing states, will thus be a key deciding factor in who is elected to the White House.
Yet it is worth noting, that this ‘Battle for the Soul of the Nation’ epic is only unfolding now because another Fionn mac Cumhaill listened to his band of followers and decided against every feeling in every sinew in his body, as loyal Diarmaid slipped further away into the night with the beautiful Gráinne... that she was just not worth it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/