Trying to get over

Joe Biden did the last TV interview of his presidency with Lawrence O’Donnell:
President Joe Biden — in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that aired Thursday and which was Biden’s last TV sit-down as POTUS ― reflected on his failure to hype up his and Democratic accomplishments when in office.
“The mistake we made was, I think I made, was not getting our allies to acknowledge that ‘the Democrats did this,‘” Biden said. “So, for example, build a new billion-dollar bridge over a river. Well, call it the ‘Democratic bridge,’ figuratively speaking. Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this is something the Democrats did. That it was done by the party.”
“I’m not a very good huckster,” Biden acknowledged.
“That wasn’t a stupid thing for him [President-elect Donald Trump] to do,” Biden said of the returning president’s first-term insistence that his own signature be added to COVID-era pandemic relief checks. Biden didn’t go as far, signing a letter sent out via the IRS that explained the payments.
Of Trump’s signature branding move, Biden said: “It helped him a lot and it undermined our ability to convince people that we were the ones that were getting this to them.”
Biden suggested he’d spent “too much time on the policy and not enough time on the politics.”
And of forcefully promoting the party’s achievements, Biden said: “It just seems, I know it sounds so stupid to say it, almost bad taste.”
Yeah it does sound stupid to say it, because [if you pass this pop quiz your IQ is at least 144].
This kind of thing goes some way towards explaining how someone who was a very good president overall got kicked out of office by the voters in favor of a felonious carnival barker, who is by orders of magnitude the worst person to ever hold that office.
And here is another way that Biden’s age hurt him: It seems very strange to say that someone with 52 years of experience on the national political stage would be bad at politics, but Biden was very good at the politics of a previous era. The politics of the era of reality TV and Facebook and Vince McMahon and Fox News? Not so much.
Biden wasn’t quite crass and cynical enough for the America that existed by the end of his political life, which is why his presidency will in the long run end up being remembered as a kind of footnote to the age of Trump, as Jimmy Carter’s is remembered as a footnote to the age of Reagan.
Top ten singles from Joe Biden’s first month in the US Senate:
You’re So Vain, Carly Simon
Superstition, Stevie Wonder
Superfly, Curtis Mayfield
Why Can’t We Live Together, Timmy Thomas
The World is a Ghetto, War
BTW the flags were at all at half mast at Nixon’s second inauguration that month, because Harry Truman had died the day after Christmas. They won’t be on Monday, because Jesus told Mike Johnson to raise them.