Joe Biden now relies on instruction manuals, so here’s a good one: ‘Walk to podium, smile, wave goodbye’ | Marina Hyde

The Joe Biden re-election campaign is now a situation where you want to put your hands over your eyes even when your hands are already over your eyes. Like mine, all your sets of hands may have been clamped tightly to your lids since Biden’s franchise-killing performance in the first presidential debate 12 days ago, which his press secretary incredibly handwaved away by stating: “He had a cold”. A cold what? A cold sweat? A cold day in hell? A cold dead hand he’d like you to prise the nomination out of?

In news that launched a million grimace emojis, the answer turns out to be: all of the above. Biden is on a fightback. Yesterday he railed against “elites” in the Democratic party, proudly deploying that great Donald Trump innovation whereby the actual president is somehow not an elite. In a strongly worded letter you strongly know was worded by someone else, Biden ordered the Democrats to stop worrying and love the bomb (I lightly paraphrase). A neurologist repeatedly came to the White House last year to treat other people who work there, the White House insists, while Biden last week told a meeting of governors that he was fine, reportedly adding, “It’s just my brain”. OK! Last Friday, he gave a sit-down interview in which he was asked how he’d feel if he clung on in the race then lost to Trump. “As long as I gave it my all, and did as good of a job as I know I can do,” Biden judged, “that’s what this is about.”

Factcheck: I’m being told that is not at all what the forthcoming US presidential election is about. And listen, before we go on, please save your embossed letterhead/well-meaning digital death threats. I already know who much the worst candidate is. Furthermore – and it’s just a personal thing – I would very, very much like to see him beaten. Huge fan of American democracy here, which is to say – huge fan of the country of America having democracy. In fact, speaking of colds, you’ve probably heard the expression “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. Most of us in the droplet radius have zero clinical interest in discovering what the world catches when America does … whatever this is.

Which makes it somewhat painful that I am currently looking at White House-issued instruction pictures taken from the wings of various stages, about 10 footsteps from where you’d expect any occupier of those stages to make a speech – pictures with the heading: “walk to podium”. These are the leaked official templates for those guiding Biden through forthcoming events. There will doubtless be plenty on hand to claim that this is standard procedure when event planning at this level, to which the only reasonable response is: please, please tell that to the countless millions with access to televisions and the internet who have already seen Biden struggle with any number of stage entrances and exits! Please tell that to the optics! Please tell that to the vibes! In the meantime, please tell it to my subconscious because every time I look at one of these pictures it immediately rearranges itself into the image of a yawning hellchasm, beneath the heading “walk to the abyss”.

This is all more than beginning to feel like the path over the edge, which the Democratic establishment has thoughtfully plotted out by its truly timeworn tactic of hoping for the best, and in no way preparing for the worst. What’s the worst that can happen, ask people who already saw the worst happen once before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … autocracy? As far as Biden’s cognitive state is concerned, if only there had been different signs to all the signs there were.

Then again, only last year did the Democratic leadership in the House – which had a combined age of 973 or something – finally begin giving way to some non-thinned blood, having clung on in varying stages of decline out of … what? Selflessness? A fundamental/fundamentalist belief that they were the good guys? Forget the audacity of hope – this is the obnoxiousness of hope. The arc of history is now bending in the direction of the hellchasm. Why should it be a toss-up between Trump and a guy who in all conscience no one should say is operating without impairment? How dare this be the choice? This, alas, is the other reflection sparked by those “walk to podium” instruction manuals. Oh NOW you’re planning every last detail! Well, it’s like they say – micromanage all the tiny little things now and it absolutely won’t matter that you macro-fucked-up the big thing back when finessing a change wouldn’t have been a last-minute scramble.

Possibly the only minuscule bright spot currently are the amusing scenes in Hollywood, where starry donors are reportedly turning on Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder-turned-Biden campaign co-chair, for supposedly concealing the president’s true state of mental fitness from them, and making them part with infinitesimal percentages of their money. As the Endeavor mogul Ari Emanuel remarked mildly last week: “We are in Fuck City”. (On the plus side for Katzenberg, the worst thing he’s ever done is no longer Quibi.)

None of this is how healthy democracies operate. Non-democracies? Oh yes. Petro-state princes are kept alive in western hospitals long after natural causes have kicked in, with their vast dependent entourages somehow unwilling to switch off the life support machine, what with it being directly connected to the cash tap. The Russians used to joke about Brezhnev that his daily routine ran as follows: reanimation, makeup, banquet, awards ceremony, clinical death. The people couldn’t do a whole lot about it, but they knew. Everyone knew. Spitting Image portrayed his successor-but-one, Konstantin Chernenko, as something kept in the freezer and only reanimated when occasion demanded. There are currently flashes of this vein of satire in every opening monologue on the US late-night TV shows.

As far as ways forward go, there are not exactly a whole load of tried and tested walks-to-podium. But the Democrats have surely exhausted the limits of irrational hope as a victory strategy. The gruelling presidential campaign has not even got fully under way. In the absence of a candidate who appears consistently rational, rational solutions must be found. In the meantime, we might prepare some simple briefing notes of our own for Biden’s strategists. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest “anti-elite” conman by railing against “elites” in the Democratic party. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest liar by being economical with your own actualité. And you’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest gaslighter by gaslighting people in your own way. There’s more than one way to be a hero. Sometimes the greatest legacy is knowing when to walk from the podium.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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