Biden and that debate: he has become death

Thinking about it retrospectively, three events in my life prepared me for seeing the absolute state of Joe Biden in the presidential debate with Donald Trump on Friday (28/06/2024) NZ time.

The first was looking under an old wooden villa in Grey Lynn and seeing the mummified body of a cat. The fur had fallen off, the skin had folded in on itself and turned white and was like parchment. The eye sockets were hollowed out, eyes long gone. It was beyond dead, motionless for decades. That is what age renders. They make that final journey consciously to go under the house to die alone and there it is, years later, a dusty, dried-up husk. It looked like a discarded, contorted old sock puppet lying in the arid detritus. Did the owner care, or remember when Mr Snuggles limped off coughing in the summer of 1983 never to return? Was it a heart-breaking mystery or an anticipated blessing?

The second was the haunting two words from a frail old man standing on the deck of his house said to me as I looked up at him.  A month before a body in a coffin (a young Maori woman from the mid 1800s) had been exhumed from below what was now his freshly built deck. I had spoken to his son about the Hapu concerns that the beach dune development (Waiotahi Drifts) was entirely a waahi tapu and the urupa found during the digging of the final post of his deck was evidence of that. He and the local corrupt Iwi entity (the Whakatohea Maori Trust Board) had conspired with the corrupt Archaeologist assigned to the subdivision to make it all disappear.  When I returned after a month to follow up the deck was finished. I knocked on the window closest and – after a long wait – an ancient, thin, very grey man shuffled out onto the deck. He made his way toward me – I was on the other side of his front fence, not wanting to go in. His son had told me his father was terminal and was going to be moving in to spend his last days there. Given I had mentioned one of the few possible legitimate uses of the land, given its status – apart from cemetery and crematorium – was a euthanasia or hospice facility, it did occur to me it was actually being used as the latter. I had in mind a very direct approach before I had seen him: lay out the facts, tell him there wasn’t going to be any compromises from the Hapu that the corrupt trust board had made without authority, and to tell him we will demand the re-interment back in situ, the site marked off and re-surveyed, and the house would have to be set well back from where it was currently. We had been mucked around enough with wholesale desecration that I was going to tell ole McDonald that it wasn’t his farm and how it would be in no uncertain terms. Decolonisation was going to start right here and right now, with you – arsehole. From the excruciatingly long time it took for him to inch his way to me I was re-assessing that approach. His pallid eyes and drawn face were of a defeated man, giving in to a losing battle. I started with hello and stated who I was and that I had spoken to what must be his son a couple of weeks ago about the dead Maori found under his back yard. He had heard everything I said, but all he replied was “I’m dying.” Oh God the way he said it. Oh God the way he looked. It was like a quiet cry almost it was so high pitched and wavery. What got me most in his delivery was the absence of energy – there was no puff left in him. The voice didn’t come from the diaphragm or the body or the throat or even the tongue, it vibrated in between his front teeth before trailing off. No bass, no balls, no volume, no verve. He really was dying. A drained shell. Fading to white. He just looked at me. I looked back. And all that tough talk I was about to unleash about Homie not playing that game anymore receded rapidly. Do I really have to tell him, right now, that his people and their system of oppression is evil when he’s this close to a permanent clock-out from this Mikey Mouse colony and from the planet. I couldn’t do it. I whimped out. Homie, apparently, was going to play that game one more time after all. I made an excuse, started mumbling about something and said please tell your son I called round. Total cop-out. I just couldn’t do it. That guy was so close to death he was at the end of extra time. I didn’t have it in me to play clipboard warrior when confronted with someone’s mortality, it wouldn’t have been right for either of us. Manaakitanga and aroha would prevail, as it must.  Let the cat go back under the house already. I can hear him still: “I’m dying.” Oh God. It was the verbalisation of the last movement of Mahler’s 9th, if you’ve ever heard it. The sadness. The inevitability of it. The life that was flowing away, that must end. Haunting. “I’m dying.” As I drove away, out of that creepy, cursed suburb/cemetery, I knew people would have seen me at this place and I prayed he wouldn’t die in the next 24 hours as I would surely be blamed for causing it – something distressing I would have presumed to have said to him.  I didn’t want to touch him either – we were far apart enough not to have a handshake. Death has an irrational infectious quality. Even old age seemed to me a transmissible malady in that moment. Reeking of death is not too strong a description.

The third event was seeing a stroke happen in real time. In the middle of a hui someone had asked if this woman was OK and when we looked one side of her face had slumped and she had become paralysed. We got her to the hospital quickly and she has since recovered somewhat but has slurred speech and limited movement down one side. (But it’s not all bad news for her lifestyle as she’s still smoking). The terror of that moment, when someone is in a health emergency which we are helpless to stop, is a sobering experience. It’s all happening internally – a tragic self-harm episode of the aging body. We witnessed that fragility of body and life and down deep we wonder if that will be our fate, or worse – and who knows when. Were they unlucky they had a stroke, or were they lucky they survived a stroke? We were fortunate she survived her misfortune is perhaps a better take.

Those three life experiences bear on my analysis of Biden’s performance in that debate – they ended up the reference points for making sense of what I had seen.

Biden was so pale he was doing white face. When he did his granddad shuffle onto the stage, with his long, whispy hair dragged across his head like The Simpson’s nemesis C. Montgomery Burns and when he pointed to the stage and smiled his crooked smile we knew we had the un-jacked Biden. No State of the Nation Jill Juice from Dr Biden tonight. He wasn’t bringing an A game, it turned out an E game – E for empty. Is this dead cat going to bounce? Cadaverous would be accurate as for appearance, shambolic as for performance and calamitous as the outcome. A worse showing would not have been possible – and to think another debate is scheduled for September!

For once a debate that wasn’t about Trump. His usual swag of hyperbole and half-truths in a format where he was more or less forced to be presidential merely magnified Biden’s octogenarian gaffes as the merciless split screen CNN reverted to as the default cut proved brutally telling. That lifeless white skin took me back to that desiccated feline under the house. The slumped left side of Biden’s face during some parts were disturbing. When he began slurring and when the whole side – mouth, cheeks, eyes – have slumped like that my thought went back to that stroke happening. When his breath seemed to barely carry the words, so faintly and quietly rasped my thought went back to “I’m dying.” That distant, frozen gaze, that mouth hanging agape, it was a difficult watch. I have seen it before and it is death. A performance so bad it really could be set to Mahler’s masterpiece of ebbing life. His sentences trailing off were a muffled, muted epilogue to a once was firebrand. Biden is so old that the earliest news clip of him on YouTube (after he entered congress) is in black and white. His first bid for the presidency was forty years ago. He is an old timer and an old time server. We were watching a relic.

With his stumbling, stuttering and slurring you would assume Trump made mince meat out of old Joe and hammered him on it at every turn. Au contraire. Trump was at pains to keep this knacker’s yard donkey in the game by pulling punches in the debate and also at his rally the following day insisting Biden polls best against him. Quite something to watch – Trump is obviously terrified Biden will drop out. At this point Trump has offered more public support to Biden than the Democrats have. And what Dems have offered is pathetic and desperate reasoning, forced as they are to recognise the appalling debate loss: pity vote Biden. But pity votes are losing votes – the electorate will not vote out of pity that is not how competitive politics works.

I have followed the betting markets and the odds quite closely. They don’t usually get things wrong. For a long time it was running about $1.90 Trump, $2.70 Biden. When I checked just after the debate ended it was $1.60 Trump, $3.00 Biden. The hot money in the exchanges (with no margins) was $1.70 Trump, $4.50 Biden. Gavin Newsom at this stage was $15, Michelle Obama $26, Kamala Harris $40, RFK Jr $98, Hillary Clinton $78, Gretchen Whitmer $147. Within half an hour of the debate ending Trump had tightened only slightly, but Biden had widened on the fixed odds to $4.50 and on the exchange to $5.60, Newsom was under $10, Obama $16, Harris $27, Clinton $60, Whitmer $108. These are massive movements in a very short space of time. The market had decisively abandoned Biden. After a few more hours it was Whitmer who had made the most ground coming into $40 – incredible as she was well over $100. Biden stabilised on the back of reassurances from top Dems that he was locked in. I don’t think Jill Biden’s coaxing of her husband like a toddler at the post-debate would have assisted the market confidence though – her shrill tone as she screeched to the crowd to call Trump a liar was ear-splitting (Joe seemed unmoved, he probably can’t hear in that range anymore to his great relief).

I can’t see Biden going on much longer even with the institutional backing of the Dems and the donors after this debate. It would seem impossible. The tepid and apologetic endorsements from Obama et al impute reservations. Biden’s rally the following day was also rather sad and miserable and for what energy he may have summoned for that occasion he was still slurring and fumbling.

As of Monday (01/07/2024) morning to win the Presidency: Trump $1.65, Biden $4.60, Newsom $10, Michelle Obama $17, Harris $26, Whitmer $34.