The Bidens?

Timing is everything, especially in politics. While Bob Mueller spent a decade perseverating about Trump, he should have packed up his grandchildren and taken everyone to Disneyland. That’s for all the good his judiciousness did us. Speaking as someone who hung on every utterance, I thought he would save us from the depredations of Trump I. Before he finished, he was already in the first stage of Alzheimer’s.

Same with Merrick Garland in the years that followed. Both men gave in to a fatal meticulousness and will now be remembered (if they are remembered at all), as officials who failed to deliver the goods in a way that might have made a difference. You can do everything right and still get everything wrong if you make your final argument when everyone has stopped listening.

Jill and Joe Biden have the opposite problem. Both are apparently tortured by obscurity, or what passes for obscurity when you have once been President and First Lady. All they want to do is deliver a final argument long before anyone is ready to hear from them.

Jill was first with an unnecessary book that argues the case that we wuz robbed. She grudges through her story of the fatal debate and complains about the people who nudged her husband toward abdication. She confesses that she was rattled by Joe’s performance, thinking that he was in the middle of a stroke. But then she argues that others should have waited. What happened instead brought to pain to the Bidens.

Speaking as someone who loved Joe Biden, you don’t get to be president when you perform like Joe, and Jill’s only job was to hustle him offstage. The pain of the Bidens is an important issue, but it is nothing compared to the health of the nation. It’s ironic to have to say it now, but Joe was a candidate, not a king.

As for Joe, himself, he’s also a mess, an infirm version of his former self, but back on stage in places like North Dakota, reminding all of us of the catastrophe of his run. I confess that I could live with that, but not his analysis of Trump’s wicked presidency. According to report, Biden spoke about the ballroom. He spoke about the arch, and—horrors—the reflecting pool. Those are crucial instances of Donald’s Trump’s vanity, but they will not be enough to win the election.

Instead, everyone needs to be talking about the economy. Everyone needs to be talking about health care. Everyone needs to be talking about war so that the truth of our situation is foregrounded each day. America is now a leaky tanker stuck in the shallows of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is the one who put us there, and we need a new Congress to punish his stupidity.

The short version here is a matter of timing. There is a world where I’d like to hear from the Bidens, but not in the middle of this perilous hour. A former president of the likes of Joe Biden should in fact have a useful role in politics. But he and his family have to be up to the task, not delusional actors in a private drama with the rest of us caught as astonished bystanders.