Is Joe Biden the new Ronald Reagan?

“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.”

No that is not President Joseph R. Biden lapsing into another “senior moment”. The speaker was Ronald W. Reagan caught off-mic in 1984, four years into his Presidency. 

Reagan’s remark was deeply unhelpful since at the time US-USSR relations were just starting to thaw out from the deep freeze of the Cold War. How different from today. Russia, the Soviet Union’s successor, is now engaged in a bloody and unprovoked invasion of a neighbouring state. In such circumstances, Biden’s supposed gaffe in Warsaw about Putin — “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” — seems mild in comparison. 

As an aspiration it is merely an expression of justly provoked exasperation and, I would argue, a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. Yet from left, right and centre the roof has fallen in on the hapless President, who has been condemned as incompetent, senile or worse. Biden was chided by President Macron and American spokespeople and foreign policy grandees rushed to clarify that he was not announcing a US policy of regime change. Latest US opinion polls suggest that Donald Trump would comfortably defeat Biden in a presidential rematch.

At the time of their Russophobic outbursts, both Reagan and Biden had decades of form both for verbal slips and for condemning Moscow. In 1983, Reagan delivered his “evil empire” speech in which he borrowed the term from Star Wars and his beloved Hollywood to declare that the Soviet Union was “the focus of evil in the modern world”. Shortly after his inauguration last year, Biden agreed with an interviewer that Putin was “a killer” who he would ensure was “going to pay” for Russian interference in US politics. 

A year after outlawing Russia, Reagan was to be found in Geneva at a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Further summits followed. When in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet communism collapsed, Reagan was hailed as a hero for standing firm, especially for another blunt message delivered in Berlin two years previously “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” 

Dismissing any suggestions of parallels between Reagan and Biden, conservative commentators stress the “wall” speech and tend to overlook the earlier bombing and evil remarks. Reagan benefits from hindsight because things turned out well. Or at least most people thought they did. The ex-KGB officer Putin has repeatedly bemoaned the collapse of the Soviet Empire as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the [Twentieth] century”, which, if nothing else, displays a rather relaxed attitude to genocide. More tragically still, this grievance is the motivation for his war on Ukraine. 

There have been many US presidents who have struggled to use language felicitously. Donald Trump was practically incapable of ad-libbing or tweeting a grammatically accurate sentence but everybody knew what he meant, even when he said he preferred to believe Putin over his own intelligence services. 

Reagan’s gaffes were excused as part of his sunny “morning in America” persona. Nobody expected the former Governor of California to have a grip on details of policy, which were left to experts such as George Schultz and James Baker to sort out. 

No such allowances are made for Biden, who admits himself that he is “a gaffe machine”. This is partly because his outbursts are often aggressive or reveal the ingrained prejudices of septuagenarian ordinary Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania. In exchanges, he has variously told members of the public that they are “fat”, “stupid bastards”, “liars”, “a lying dog-faced pony soldier”, “full of shit” and “to go and vote for someone else”. Speaking of wealth inequality he contrasted the “white and the poor”. Quarrelling with the views of one African American, he told him “you ain’t black”. Many took offence at his commendation of Barack Obama as “articulate, bright and clean.” As a Senator, Obama endured Biden’s verbosity on the Foreign Relations Committee, messaging aides “Shoot. Me. Now.”

Biden went on to serve Obama as Vice President for eight years in a constructive partnership, in spite of awkward moments. There was embarrassment when Biden was overheard commending Obamacare as “a big fucking deal” and suggested publicly that the President should think about the consequences of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama is widely thought to believe that Biden should be a one-term president, or at least stands a slim chance of re-election. Obama’s preferred candidate for the 2024 Democratic nomination is said to be Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, currently in charge of handing out the largesse from Biden’s Infrastructure and Investment Act.

Inevitably Donald Trump jnr has joined in the attacks on Biden on Twitter claiming: “The whole world knows that we have no leadership at the top just an empty suit with a teleprompter (and he can’t even get that right). They look at America’s weakness right now and are salivating.” Those Fox News anchors echoing him might look to the longevity of their proprietor Rupert Murdoch. Or the life-long struggle with stammering that his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, shared with Joe Biden.

Biden’s biggest problem for re-election is his age. He is the oldest ever serving occupant of the White House. He will celebrate his eightieth birthday on 20 November this year. Thanks perhaps to the wonders of modern medicine the top three oldest presidents are all recent. Reagan ended his second term aged 78 and, barring a second term, Trump was out of office at 74. 

First elected to the US Senate in 1972, troubles with words have played their part in Biden’s painfully slow, half a century-long, climb to the presidency. Borrowing the Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s speech, without attribution, about being the first in his family in a thousand generations to go to college led to accusations of plagiarism and CV exaggeration and Biden’s early withdrawal from the 1988 White House race. 

Yet the commentators now patronising Biden for ignorance and lack of foreign policy experience are wildly wrong. Before being vice president, traditionally a role that picks up some of the slack of diplomacy, he was a long-serving member of the foreign relations committee, active on all the major geopolitical questions, starting with Vietnam and arms control.

His critics are angry now because they say it is undiplomatic to say Putin should go. They argue it will only make the Russian despot more paranoid and more determined to hang on and rally his nation around military adventurism. As if every aspect of Putin’s conduct did not seem to confirm the reports that he is obsessed with the fall of other autocrats, and obsessively watches clips of Qadafi’s ugly demise in Libya. Caution against poking the Russian bear seems redundant when the bear is already ransacking Europe. 

Biden’s political reputation has been built on plain speaking. Albeit clumsily and at great length, Joe tells it how he sees it. He is not a liar and is often on the wavelength of many ordinary citizens, including ethnic minorities. 

History may yet show that Putin’s appeasers are wrong to attack Joe for saying it ain’t so.