President Joe Biden has several verbal tics that are markers of his habitual effort to present himself, against all the evidence, as a straight shooter, a no-nonsense, ordinary guy who tells it like it is.
His numbingly repetitive invocation of “folks” in his State of the Union address to Congress is a prime example. The transcript on the White House website acknowledges that he said “folks” 19 times in 62 minutes. That’s nearly once every three minutes.
Sometimes, it was like machine-gun fire. “And folks, that means make more cars …,” “Folks — third — the third thing we can do to change the standard of living for hardworking folks is cut the cost of childcare,” and, in the next sentence, “Folks, if you live in a major city in America …”
It is not just the words chosen by the president that implicitly and falsely assert a claim to simplicity and candor. So does his facial expression. His default is always to arrange the few remaining mobile parts of his face — his mouth (slightly open) and his twinkling eyes (narrowed quizzically) — in a look of incredulity that anyone would or could dispute the logic of his argument. It is the mask of a man who wishes to convey that the truths he speaks are self-evident. They are so obvious that he does not have to argue them, which is handy.
But it is poor camouflage. The case Biden makes for almost everything is the reverse of self-evident. Indeed, it has exited the realm of reality and disappeared into the utterly implausible. Suggesting that what you’re saying is incontrovertible is a poor tactic if what you’re saying is obvious hogwash.
Most politicians stretch the truth to their advantage but also recognize that there must be limits to the stretching. There is a breaking point. To be persuasive, claims made must remain within the pale of plausibility. Otherwise, the listener simply thinks, who am I going to believe, you or your lying eyes?
Among the really choice examples of Biden flying off at a tangent into outer space rather than staying in a wide orbit in truth’s solar system is what he said about inflation. He and his White House have given up pretending that prices accelerating at more than 7% annually is just an upper-class gripe about the cost of exercise bikes rather than a genuine problem for ordinary “folks” buying gasoline and groceries.
But the president still won’t talk about rising prices honestly. Instead, he’s switched to pretending that the way to push prices down is for his government to spend more money on universal pre-K and subsidies for electric cars. In short, he is saying, hey folks, the way to end the screaming pain I’ve inflicted on you is to adopt precisely the policies I’ve been advocating for more than a year, but that cannot command congressional majorities because they are fiscally reckless and would stoke inflation.
Biden has told whoppers all his life. His political technique now is not just to ignore the truth, but to ignore that everyone knows he’s ignoring it. It is an abject way to lead.
