Reflections On Uncle Bosey

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb fully the implications of Joe's Uncle Bosey remarks, which he gave twice on Wednesday, April 17. Here's the transcipt of the key remarks in the second version that he gave in Pittsburgh, which are also covered in the YouTube clip above:

And my uncle — they called him Un- — Ambrose — instead of “Brosie,” they called him “Bosie.” My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones.

And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.

The schoolmarms in the media promptly fact-checked this, and I'm not going to spend time repeating the historical version. But several features of the Pittsburgh episode in particular popped out to me. The first is the dutiful politeness of the facial expressions on the union members who stood behind him. This reminded me of a report from another stop he made in Pittsburgh that day:

Biden stopped at a gas station this week to order food in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon entering, few flocked to interact with him. Most patrons stood by, did not hold out their hands, and watched the president walk past.

Biden tried to speak with a girl when he entered the station, but after receiving little interaction, he slowly marched on while cameras followed and onlookers pressed themselves up against the wall. Biden posed for a few photos before he walked to the door.

Everyone is being polite -- this is the leader of the free world, after all. Everyone's anxious to get this over with. But now, it seems that even pre-teen girls are wary of him.

The second big takeaway is his delivery. Initially, I was going to approach this from the perspective of The King's Speech, in which the speech therapist Lionel Logue discovers that George VI, plagued with a stammer that's persisted since childhood, can do things like sing or shout cusswords without stammering. At first, I thought that Joe had delivered the Uncle Bosey story without -- or at least, with less of -- the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism with which he delivers more scripted remarks.

But reviewing the segment above, I began to recognize several things. The first is that these aren't spontaneous remarks, this is the second time he's told this story that day. In fact, he's clerly glancing down at notes while he's talking about his uncle and the cannibals, and apparently his big point, which is repeated in both the transcripts of the Uncle Bosey story, is that Bosey's heroism stands in contrast to Trump's calling American war dead “suckers” and “losers.”

Well, that got lost in the shuffle when it turned out that Uncle Bosey wasn't eaten by cannibals after all. This is not "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" level oratory, even if someone wrote it out for him. But the second problem is that, although there's somewhat less slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism in his remarks than there was, for instance in Friday's speech to the electrical workers:

You — by the way, go on out and ask people who know you — that you’re acquainted with who aren’t in the business at all, “What’s it take to be an electrician?” You say, “Oh, well, you just say (inaudible). You get a little bit of training.” Four to five years of training to become an electrician. You’re the best in the world. That’s why it’s the (inaudible). (Applause.)

the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism is still there, teleprompter or no.

We're back to Nate Silver's recommendation from last February that I linked again the other day, that Joe get out and do unscripted, improvisational encounters. The problem is that they're all scripted. Someone thought the Uncle Bosey story would look like a spontaneous personal aside, but it was clearly written for him on notes that he looked down to read as he spoke, and he stumbled through the same remarks twice -- and scripted as they were, they were nevertheless dumb remarks that drew all the attention from the intended point.

When the opportunity arises for truly unscripted encounters, as might have happened in the Wawa and Sheetz stores in Pennsylvania this past week, he just shuffles glumly through them. It might be that he comes off as unapproachable, but I almost wonder if, as apparently happens frequently with the pre-teen girls he approaches himself, he comes off as someone people don't want to be approached by, either.

And this brings me back to something I've mentioned before, the features we frequently see in his speech, scripted or spontaneous, include slurring and hypercorrection, which are featues of speech that an experienced police officer would immediately recognize as indicating intoxication. This is borne out in the Pittsburgh clip at the top this post as well -- for much of the segment, his facial fwatures are flaccid, numb, and unexpressive, which I was taught many years ago is how the term s***faced is derived. For that matter, his tone often trails off into maudlin-confidential and barely audible.

His remarks at Scranton the other day, when he breought up Uncle Bosey the first time, included a number of other debunked stories, including

We had just finished spring football practice at the University of Delaware. And I had been named as the likely starting safety that year and — next year.

But the one that I think has the least credibility of all, no matter how many times he tells it, is this one:

I’m the only Scrantonian and the only Irishman you’ve ever met that’s never had a drink in his life because too many people have too many drinks in their life, in my opinion.

This man is plastered, pretty much all day, every day. The big mystery is why nobody has called him on it. I suspect that people who know him even a little bit, from Obama on down, have known this for decades and are keeping quiet.