Jean Chretien and Joe Biden.

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about how they were similar. Their similarities, in fact, were such that I was persuaded to support the latter because of my many years of work for the former.

Consider: both politicians were older than most of their competition, and were often dismissed as ‘yesterday’s men’ as a result.

Both regularly mangled grammar and syntax – Biden because he had a childhood stammer which he overcame, and Chretien because he reportedly does not speak either official language.

Both men came from large and poor families in small towns. Biden, from Scranton in Pennsylvania – and Chretien from Shawinigan in Quebec.

Both men spent many decades in government before getting the top job. Both were regularly underestimated by their opponents, and they greatly benefited from that. Both had disdain for the elites in their respective parties.

And, this: both were fighters. Meaning, if you pushed them, they would push back.

When Paul Martin’s thugs commenced trying to push Chretien out, he dug in his heels, and ran again – winning an unprecedented and massive third majority government in 2000. And when the Martinites kept pushing, Chretien said he would leave – 18 months later. Team Martin went on to lose the majority, and then lose government.

For weeks we have been witnessing something similar with Joe Biden.

Full disclosure: I volunteered for Joe Biden in 2020, getting out the vote in a dozen different states. I was proud to do so. But after I saw his performance in the first (and almost certainly only) presidential debate with Donald Trump, I knew – as someone who has great affection for him – that Joe Biden should not run for a second term. It wouldn’t be good for him, for America, or for the free world.

Lots of Democrats immediately had the same view. And, in the intervening weeks, they went public with their desire to push Joe Biden out. Veteran members of the US Senate and the House of Representatives said Joe should go. More mutineers were stepping up to the microphones every day.

A Covid-stricken Biden responded by retreating to his beachfront home, and refusing to engage with his critics. His staff told the media that he wasn’t going anywhere, and likened the naysayers to bedwetters. He was going to run again as the Democratic presidential candidate, they insisted.

This is where the Biden and Chretien similarities end.

Chretien left with a 60 per cent approval rating. He left on the date of his choosing. He left his party in good shape, and he left the country with a balanced budget. He left the way he wanted to.

Biden, meanwhile, has been unpopular with American voters, and he was getting more unpopular by the day. He was dragging his heels and dragging his party down. He was putting himself, and his ego, before the interests of his party and his country – something he promised never, ever do.

The writing was on the wall, as they say. But Joe Biden seemed to be the only person in America who couldn’t read it – or refused to look.

I have worked for older veteran politicians who sometimes talk funny and are underestimated. I know the species. If you take a swipe at them, you’ve got to be prepared to get it back, twice as hard. They really, really don’t like to be pushed around.

But in the end, Jean Chretien knew when to leave, and he left on his own terms. Joe Biden didn’t know it was time to leave.

Until today.

 

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Comments (7)

Too soon?

That was the question being asked, online, 24 hours after the assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump.

People – not always anonymous, and some of them not necessarily Democrats – were posting funny and not-so-funny memes about Trump and the foiled assassination. One showed Trump depicted as artist Vincent van Gogh, who of course famously removed his own ear. Another, a bit later, showed the white rectangular bandage on the former president’s injured ear, with the line: “What happens when you order a pillow from Temu.”

A couple of the memes were funny. Some, not so much.

But in every case, a question arose: is it too soon to be joking about an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate? Shouldn’t attempts at humor wait a bit longer?

In the case of the conspiracy theorists, of course, there was no wait. Minutes after reports about the shooting went out to a shocked world, the word “staged” was trending on X, formerly Twitter. Lots of other conspiracy theories, too, to the effect that what had happened hadn’t really happened.

But that’s the conspiracy nutbars. They’re too stupid to ever believe that reality is, you know, real.

The people who were making fun of Trump’s near-death experience, however, were a different matter. In the past, making jokes about political assassinations, and attempted ones, was unheard of. In the United States, it might get you a visit from the Secret Service. Elsewhere, it was a good way to swiftly lose your job and your reputation.

Not these days. The assassination had become fodder for jokes within hours of it happening. (Not two Canadian university professors, in Ontario and in BC, however – they expressed chagrin that the assassin missed his target. Those fools did not seem to be joking.)

Comedians can get away with joking about taboo subjects because that is their job: to joke about taboo subjects. But making light of an assassination attempt? Why were so many taking the risk?

There are three possible reasons.

One, in the social media age, restraint has gone by the wayside. People can say outrageous things, and do, within seconds on social media platforms. Reflecting on a post before it is posted seems almost quaint and old-fashioned.

There’s a second reason why inappropriate things were being said about Donald Trump online – and even before the dust had even settled at his Pennsylvania rally. It’s Trump himself. If the Republican presidential nominee is known for anything, it is for saying outrageous and offensive things online, 24/7. He’s licensed Internet-based extremes.

That, perhaps, is why Trump and his winged monkeys did not urge restraint: because they never show restraint themselves.

The third reason is the likeliest one.

The cliché used to be that a week was a lifetime in politics. These days, a single day is a lifetime. Events move so quickly, and the news-cycle has become so compressed, that an actual attempt to assassinate an actual former president had lost its shock value – almost immediately. Among Trump’s MAGA core, of course, it was an event with biblical significance.

But for everyone else, it was simply another terrible thing happening in the terrible year that is 2024. In this era, nothing can shock anymore, because all of us – principally because of the devices we all carry in our pockets – have mostly seen it all. Political scandals, natural disasters, pogroms – none of it really registers, anymore, because we’ve seen and heard it all. Too many times.

For the luckless Democrats, this is arguably a good thing. Even after Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance with Trump, national polls were not showing a dramatic shift. That surprised everybody. And, now, an attempt on his main opponent’s life isn’t yet a big deal, say the national polls. This week, surveys even showed that Biden and Trump are only a point apart.

Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, what once shocked us isn’t so shocking anymore. What was once historic doesn’t feel so very history-making.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump. But I would greatly prefer to see him defeated at the ballot box. Not ever with a bullet.

And, call me old-fashioned, but it still feels a little early to be making jokes about someone – even Donald J. Trump – being assassinated.

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Okay, I’ll take the wheel, here. Just for a bit.

Why? Well, you guys don’t come here to get my analysis of how well the Secret Service do their job. Although, if you ask me, I think the Secret Service will be considered a full-fledged member of the Deep State before the sun goes down tonight. If they aren’t already.

I’m not an expert on the Secret Service or how to protect Presidents, Premiers and Prime Ministers. I’ve gotten lots of credible death threats over the years, too, so I’ve interacted with police and security experts. And I learned, long ago, to defer to their expertise and judgment. But man oh man, are the Secret Service in for a rough Summer.

And you don’t come here for my take on U.S. gun laws, either. I consciously stopped commenting on mass shootings in the United States years ago. I figured that, if the mass murder of twenty five-year-old kids at Sandy Hook didn’t change them, nothing would. Not the shooting of presidents or presidential candidates, either.

They’ll continue to kill each other, because they are a nation at war with itself. Where a twenty-year-old who hasn’t even voted yet can get his hands on an assault rifle.

So, you don’t come here for any of that. You come here to get my political take, because I’ve been involved with political stuff for a long time. So, here it is. Five things.

One, it’s 113 days until Americans line up to vote. Donald Trump was already ahead, and he’ll be even more ahead now. But – but, but – it’s 113 days, which is several lifetimes in politics. So he’ll say or do something outrageous, and it’ll tighten up again, a bit.

But, as Brian Lilley and Charles Adler and Tasha Kheririddin said this morning, it’ll make Trump’s base even more convinced that he is the literal messiah. It’ll firm up his vote, big time. And he’s going to enter the Republican convention this week even stronger than he was before. Which is to say, strong. The vote may be 113 days away, but he’s the one to beat, right now.

Two, Joe Biden – who I worked for last time – has pulled his ads, changed his schedule, and is laying low. He was already going to lay low during the GOP convention. Sure. But, now, Democrats are going to be agonizing over every damn thing they do. Their internal debates – which had already spilled out into the open, after Biden’s disastrous presidential debate – are going to get a lot more challenging.

Abortion and Trump will continue to work for them as a strategy. That hasn’t changed. But the other attack? The one about the importance of democracy? That one is now a lot harder. Republicans will say American democracy is ruined and, after an attempted assassination of their candidate last night, lots of people will agree with them.

Three, I think NATO, the EU, America’s allies and American governmental institutions will start treating Trump like he’s already president. You can see that in their post-shooting comments last night. They think he’s won, now. They’re going to start changing their approach to Trump. They didn’t want Trump, but they think Trump is what they’re going to get. So, light’s out, NATO, Ukraine, Taiwan and free trade. Those are gone when and if he wins, and they all know it.

Four, Justin Trudeau. Canada’s Prime Minister is running out of time, and he has run out of moves. All that he had left was a possible Trump win. Because – sorry, Team Tory – many Canadians won’t want Pierre Poilievre in the Prime Minister’s Office when Donald Trump is in the Oval Office. They’ll want an alternative to the craziness they believe, correctly, is coming our way.

Is it enough to narrow a twenty-point gap? No, not right now. But it’ll make a difference. Canadians are big believers in alternation – Team Red at one level, Team Blue at the other level. Hell, even Calgarians do that – they’ve been electing Tory Premiers and Liberal mayors for decades.

Trump coming back will spook Canadian voters. And Trudeau will make full and frequent use of a second Trump presidency. Believe it.

Five: we live in a dangerous world – a world more dangerous than I can ever remember. As someone said to me when we went out for dinner last night, we are seeing things in 2024 that we all thought we’d never see again.

And an assassin’s bullet made everything more dangerous.

We are heading into a dark, dark place, my friends, and no one has the wheel.

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