Biden Being Biden

Axios ran as piece over the weekend that supports my view of Biden's Friday "God save the queen" remark that I ran on Saturday:

Biden’s quirky aphorisms are sometimes weaponized by Republicans to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline. But Biden has been using unique phrases for years — but even some of his aides aren't exactly sure what he means by them.

. . . Biden also said, “God save the queen,” when he was vice president in January 2017, after he certified Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, The Telegraph reported at the time.

The story noted that they'd asked several Biden aides what he meant by the phrase, but none could give a clear answer. But it went on,

During this year's State of the Union, he told Republican lawmakers, “Lots of luck in your senior year.”

Some Biden allies believe that's his way of saying, "Good luck with that." But at the time, the White House declined to tell The New York Times what he meant — and some administration officials still chuckle about how they don’t quite know, either.

The first thing I would point to is, again, the problem of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it relates to humor: people who suffer from it think they're being funny, when nobody gets the joke. And those who study Biden's speech are finding that he actually repeats his strange phrases, as he now has done with "God save the queen". Whatever he means by it, he seems to use it in a particular private context that he thinks is funny.

My surmise is that it's a shorthand for "balderdash" or something like that -- in 2017, he certified Trump's electoral victory and essentially commented "balderdash". In 2023, he uttered a string of conventionally patriotic sentiments at the University of Hartford before explaining he wouldn't shake hands with the audience and then essentially commented it was all balderdash anyhow.

The subtext here, I think, is he's the most powerful man in the world, he can utter cryptic phrases that can easily enough be parsed out to mean he doesn't think much of his audience, and they've just got to deal with it. Two years ago, I noted Biden's disdain for anyone who objected to his abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I said at tht ime

fits what I'm coming to see from this sort of offhand remark is Biden's view of himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations.

This brings me back to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Frankly, I don't think I ever had a boss (maybe with one or two exceptions) who didn't suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. None, for instance, was ever promoted from the ranks of people who did the actual work their subordinates did, but since they were the boss, they assumed they could do it. (I sometimes got in trouble for asking such a boss, complaining about something i'd done, to show me how to do it right. That sort of question was beyond the pale and showed I was a troublemaker.)

But this goes to the simmering resentment that underlies Dunning-Kruger. One of my worst bosses was a lady who spent her days driving around San Francisco-area freeways, ostensibly supervising various activities at different sites, except she never quite stopped her car to supervise anything. She just drove around, calling everyone from her car, and I don't rule out that she was plastered as she did this as well. She had her job because she'd been promoted at some company that had been merged into the current tech giant years before, and she'd just ridden the wave of mergers and acquisitions ever since. She had no idea of how actually to do any of the work.

She'd punctuate her calls with snarky little remarks like "sh*t rolls downhill" and "I hate my life", knowing there was absolutely nothing any one of us could do about it -- but I also think that behind those remarks was a seething resentment at the worker bees who could actually do their jobs, which she could not. She could fire any of us, and she often did, but we could land on our feet and get new jobs, because we knew how to do the work. She hated us for it.

I think something like that, a vestigial remnant of rudimentary conscience, is behind Biden's cryptic remarks. He rose to the presidency in an election that, if not stolen outright, was certainly hinky, and he was nominated in the first place because, at long last, he was the only credible Democrat alternative to Bernie Sanders. Other than not being Bernie Sanders and not being Donald Trump, he had no other qualifications for the job, except, as he suffered from Dunnng-Kruger, he was utterly convinced he was the man for it.

And he hates the voters who put him there. Down deep, and maybe not even that deep, he knows the jokes he keeps telling aren't funny, he knows his audience knows it, but he keeps telling the dumb stories and making the dumb remarks because people have to listen and make the best of it. I don't think even Dunning or Kruger understood that part of the Dunning-Kruger Effect -- the point is to make the competent suffer.

The Axios story concludes, and I endorse this:

There are legitimate questions about Biden's age and stamina as he runs for a second term — but his off-beat proverbs are just Biden being Biden.