In the words of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, “There’s no such thing as a bad short speech.”
Donald Trump didn’t listen to that adage Thursday night when he delivered his acceptance remarks at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
His nearly 93-minute address had some good moments, particularly at the beginning, when he somberly talked about the assassination attempt of just five days earlier, or when he made an uncharacteristic appeal for unity.
“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said.
But at other points, he deviated from the script, contradicting his calls for unity with a few gratuitous insults directed at Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, with the tired and false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and with heavy doses of the narcissism that is repugnant to those who don’t idolize him.
But mostly, after about a third into his speech, he was boring, rambling on for way too long. He might not have put the audience to sleep in Milwaukee, but he sent many to bed watching from home as he went on past midnight Eastern Time. Those stream-of-consciousness speeches might work for Trump in front of a live audience, but they make for terrible TV.
The Democrats, who’ve been getting glum about their chances in November, may feel buoyed after the Republican nominee failed to capitalize on the opportunity to win over the voters on the fence in the half-dozen states that will determine the election. The four-day Trump lovefest in Milwaukee might have energized his base, but that’s not really whom he needs to energize to win back the White House. He has to appeal to the undecided voters, particularly those who haven’t gotten amnesia about his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the siege that he sparked on the Capitol. Thursday’s speech did not do that, even if those undecided voters happened to hang on until Trump finally ran out of gas.
The danger for Joe Biden is to let Trump’s missed opportunity further encourage the Democratic incumbent to ignore his own unpopularity and continue to resist the calls within his party to drop out before it’s too late.
Images of Biden, after being diagnosed with COVID-19, struggling this past week to walk alone down the stairs of Air Force One and get into an awaiting vehicle only reinforced the conclusion implanted in the minds of the electorate by his shockingly poor debate performance last month: He is too old and feeble to handle another four years in one of the most strenuous and demanding jobs in the world.
There have been many people saying or writing this, some longer than others.
Curtis Wilkie, a retired Mississippi journalist who says he has known Biden longer than any reporter who ever covered him, has added his voice to the chorus in a column he wrote for Mississippi Today.
Wilkie, best known for the decades he spent as a reporter for The Boston Globe and the excellent book he wrote later about the downfall of Mississippi plaintiffs’ lawyer Dickie Scruggs, first met Biden in 1971. At that time, Wilkie was a 30-year-old reporter for the newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, and Biden, two years younger, was an up-and-coming local politician who would get elected the next year to the U.S. Senate. Wilkie spent a lot of time with Biden in 1972 working on a profile that got derailed by tragedy — the death of Biden’s first wife and his only daughter in a car accident.
Wilkie crossed paths with Biden several times in the decades that followed, mostly in Washington, but also in Oxford in 2007, when Biden stopped at Square Books to promote his autobiography and Wilkie, retired from the Globe, was teaching journalism at Ole Miss.
Although Wilkie hasn’t seen Biden in person since, he has kept up with him, and he says he has observed in the 81-year-old president some of the same physical and cognitive decline he has seen in himself.
Wilkie, who covered the White House during part of his career, writes that he watched how much the pressures and demands of the presidency aged men in their 40s and 50s. Biden assumed the office at the age of 78. Given his late start, the toll on him was probably magnified.
“President Biden should never have sought a second term,” Wilkie begins his piece, and he ends it with lamenting the Democrat’s decision not to do so.
“I wish that Biden had lived up to his promise in 2020 to be a ‘transitional president.’ He had succeeded in driving Trump from the White House. His presidency has been mostly successful and free of catastrophe. Months ago Biden could have delivered a statesmanlike speech — prepared to serve out his four-year term and ready to leave the job to a younger generation. To walk away, genuinely able to say, ‘Mission Accomplished.’
“Instead, his Democratic Party is faced with its worst nightmare, the distinct possibility of a sweeping victory in November for Trump and his MAGA followers. And instead of leaving a strong personal legacy, Biden may be remembered in the history of this turbulent period as a selfish man, weakened by age, who clung to his office too long.”
Wilkie implies that Biden will not reconsider, that the die has been cast. Republicans are certainly hoping so.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
