"I Don't Think Mozart's Going To Help At All"

Biden freezes before Obama grabs his arm and leads him off stage. Yikes! 😳 pic.twitter.com/nCgAGitoQ6

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 16, 2024

I wasn't going to post on Joe's freezeup at the Hollywood fundraiser on Saturday -- I was convinced the headbump with Pope Francis was as bad as things could get, and having Barack Obama forced to lead him off the stage was just a weak aftershow.

But I sat up in bed early this morning thinking about the scene in Hitchcock's Vertigo where Midge, John "Scottie" Ferguson's ex-fiancee, visits him in a psychiatric ward where he's recovering after losing his obsessive love Madeleine Elster in her phony suicide.

Scottie is sitting dazed and unresponsive with Mozart playing on a record player. Midge says,

It's Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus. I had a long talk with that lady in musical therapy, Johnny, and she says that Mozart's the boy for you. The broom that sweeps the cobwebs away. Well, that's what the lady said.

But Midge quickly realizes this isn't the cure. She tells the doctor,

You want to know something? I don't think Mozart's going to help at all.

Looking at Obama essentially giving Joe the bum's rush off the stage at the Hollywood gala, I've got to say whatever Joe's handlers might try to do that's an equivalent to Mozart for Scottie Ferguson, I don't think it's going to help at all.

Here's what nobody has mentioned. Normally when a president -- even a B-minus president like Dubya -- attended a G7 or G8, it was in the context of showcasing his accomplishments. It showed him posing triumphantly with other world leaders, among whom he was pre-eminent. For instance, here's a White House summary of Dubya at the G8 in 2007,

Fact Sheet: The President's Achievements at the G-8 Summit, Heiligendamm, Germany:

The President, In Collaboration With Other Leaders From The G-8 Nations, Took Action To Address A Broad Range Of Global Issues, Including:

• Launching a new global framework to address climate change, energy security, economic growth and sustainable development;
• Committing to partnering with African countries to foster development, especially by enabling the private sector and combating disease;

and blah blah blah. It goes without saying this is officious bombast, presidential fuss and feathers like Hail to the Chief that everyone tunes out, but even in the case of a mediocrity like Dubya, it isn't incongruous. Nobody looked at Dubya at Heiligendamm and wondered why he was there and what awful blunder he would pull next.

Many years ago, I read someone suggesting that Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election simply because he was the subject of failed assassination attempts by two women ( Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme in Sacramento September 5, 1975; and Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco on September 22, 1975).

Of all the other possible reasons for Ford's loss -- especially his pardon of Nixon -- this one immediately struck me as most persuasive. On one hand, that the attempts would be unsuccessful goes to the stereotype of the incompetent woman. On the other, that bumbling women would target Ford canceled his standing as an alpha male.

Fast forward to the G7 in Italy -- Joe wanders away from the other G7 leaders. We can grant that he may even have wandered away for a reason -- perhaps he in fact wanted to congratulate the other parachutists -- but from accounts, this wasn't the script for the events that the leaders agreed. They were all going to shake hands with one guy, not any of the others, to keep the schedule short.

So even if Joe didn't just wander away like grandpa, someone had to get him back with the program, and there we had the inescapable visual. The President of France, that is, the leader of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, noticed Joe was off script and prompted the Prime Minister of Italy, a short woman in a pink pants suit, to pull Joe back in line.

No amount of after-the-fact spin, no insistence that the visual was a cheap fake, is going to counter the impression that the leader of the free world, the alpha male of alpha males, must be fetched back like an errant toddler by a French guy and an Italian woman.

Heck, we're back to Midge in the Vertigo psychiatric ward murmuring to Scottie, "Mother's here".

If, as I was, you're impressed by a theory that certain events of state can have an outsize effect when a woman shows up in the wrong context, you can at least entertain the thought that this episode alone will cost Joe the election, and not by a narrow margin.

But beyond that, nobody has mentioned that having the president performing on the world stage at all is normally a positive. I've got to think that the White House, planning out the campaign leading into summer, thought having Joe travel to France for the D-Day commemoration and then to the G7 a week later, would give him a natural bump in the polls going into the June 27 debate with Trump.

Instead, they're having to insist yet again that Joe didn't poop his pants, he was just changing his mind about sitting down, and the business of the short Italian lady pulling him back with the group was fiendishly manipulated to be other than it was.

But how does Saturday night's scene of Barack Obama ushering Joe off the Hollywood stage play into this? Several people have observed that Joe's freeze at the end of the show was a lot like his freeze on Juneteenth -- in both cases, he stood still, face expressionless, arms slack at his side, not moving at all for an uncomfortable interval. Far fewer have noted that Dr Jill wasn't with him either time.

My sense of things is that Dr Jill is the only handler who knows Joe well enough to sense instinctively when something like this is coming, and she knows proactively what move to make to forestall it. She can be next to him and already holding his hand and pull him along or prompt him to give some sign that he's in focus. What we saw at both Juneteenth and the Hollywood fundraiser was that neither Barack Obama nor Kamala Harris can function proactively as a handler.

Kamala, even though it seems to have been assumed she'd serve as a handler without Jill there, was jivin' and looking the other way when Joe froze. Barack saw what was happening only after several awkward moments, and when he realized it, he had to use both hands to get Joe going and manhandle him offstage.

This says to me that Joe's condition is such that, at least for some significant part of the time, he needs constant attention when he's in public from someone who can anticipate his various moves and freezes. That's probably only Dr Jill at this point, and to put him in the public eye without her present is a risky proposition.

You want to know something? I don't think Mozart's going to help at all.