Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

If Biden wins, who will govern?

issue 17 October 2020

Joe Biden started spouting nonsense about his background again this week. Trying to sound all man of the people, he told a rally in Ohio that he would be the first president ‘in 80 or 90 years’ who did not attend one of those fancy Ivy League schools. Well no, Joe — Reagan didn’t go to an Ivy, nor did Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman or Hoover. Joe also likes to claim that he is ‘the first in his family to go to college’. It’s a line he famously pilfered in 1987 from a Neil Kinnock speech. It also happens to be untrue.

Three decades ago, people cared when Biden lied. Now nobody cares. It’s hard to oppose, let alone revile, a man who no longer seems to have any idea of what he is saying. Biden lost contact with reality years ago; maybe we did too. On Monday, he forgot the name of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 — ‘the senator who was a Mormon, the governor, OK?’ Later he declared, for the second time this year, that he was a ‘proud Democrat running for the Senate’.

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