Tag: America

The one foe that Joe Biden couldn’t beat

Joe Biden, who channeled perseverance and grit into a 50-year run in American politics, finally met a foe he could not beat.

His opponent in the November presidential election was technically former President Donald Trump, but it was also a much, much harder one to beat – age and perception.

The disastrous June debate performance – the worst I’ve watched in 40 years of viewing these frustrating, fascinating American events – laid bare the harsh reality of age on America’s oldest president, and in US politics, image is everything.

At 81 years old – 82 in November – Biden finally recognised today he could not win this one.

My own father died in May at 83 years old, just a little bit older than Biden. Up into his eighties, he was a tremendously strong, vital and charismatic man, until one day, he wasn’t.

Dad did many great things in his life but as he battled pancreatic cancer, he would often repeat one of our family’s favourite sayings: “It is what it is.”

The events of the past month have taken on the feeling of a slow moving car crash, and Biden’s decision today has shaken up the 2024 race in a way that may have many Americans exhaling with relief, while others will fume with frustration.

The cascade of senators and congressional leaders from Biden’s own party stepping away from his campaign was something unprecedented in presidential races of the past 40 years. A media avalanche of calls for Biden to give up – some fair, some cruel – never ceased, despite attempts to beat it back. We saw plenty of articles with doctors doing long-distance diagnoses of Biden’s possible medical conditions.

Age is not a scandal. It’s not something you can beat back with good coms, or perky memes. (The “Dark Brandon” attempts to make Biden some sunglasses-wearing superhero were cute at first, but rapidly started to feel a bit cringe.)

Every US president has aged dramatically in office – but for Biden, already past an age most people have retired, the optics were hard to overcome.

Contrary to armchair doctors all over the internet, I have never thought that Joe Biden has dementia. I have family members with dementia, and frankly, the overwhelming tsunami of hot takes online that apparently, everyone over the age of 65 has dementia, were pretty insulting.

But Biden has slowed down, as all of us do in the end.

The biggest obstacle to his run for a second term was the realisation that Americans weren’t just being asked to vote for the Joe Biden of 2024, they were being asked to vote for the Joe Biden of late 2028 who would be 86 years old and all the Joe Bidens in between.

While Trump, 78, manages to still summon up a fierce energy at his rallies, now that he will be the oldest candidate in the race, he may face far more scrutiny than before about how Trump 2024 and Trump 2016 are different. Even Trump has to face age in the end.

Only a handful of US presidents have made the decision Joe Biden did today, and none of them so late, or quite so old as Biden is.

The obvious comparison to be made now is Biden – reluctantly, but civilly – giving up the ongoing power of the presidency, and Trump, on January 6, 2021, doing everything he could to hold on to it.

Nobody quite knows what will happen this November, but the playing field has changed forever today. For Biden, it has to be a somber, frustrating day, but in the end, age cannot be explained away easily.

As my late great dad would have said, “It is what it is.”

(This one is also up over at Radio New Zealand right here!)

If it weren’t for breaking news, would we have any news at all?

It’s been another rather turbulent week if you’re a bit of a presidential history and politics nerd, in case you’ve been hiding in a dark cave somewhere in the Andes. There’s nothing quite like getting a news alert about a presidential assassination attempt at 10.30am Sunday morning to quicken the blood.

So, haven’t had much time for my usual pop-culture meandering this week (I know, all three of my fans are sorely disappointed), but I have had a few pieces reflecting on the chaos for my day job over at Radio New Zealand:

Should Biden stay or should he go? A week in politics.

… Ever since I moved to New Zealand nearly 20 (urk!) years ago, I often get asked to explain the weird world of US politics. Here in our somewhat more inclusive parliamentary system, American politics can seem darned strange to many.

I’ve monetised that nerdy niche American history knowledge to write lots of pieces over the years, although I’ve really tried to do less of that in recent times. I wrote a piece four years ago which it turns out was far too optimistically called “The last thing I’ll ever write about Donald Trump.” Hah, we were so young and innocent then. (Getting plentiful hate emails, creepy social media stalking and the like from T**mp fans after one piece also kind of cured me of giving hot takes.)

But, we live in unprecedented presidented times, don’t we? The first presidential debate of 2024 a week ago was a shocker – I wrote a preview, live-blogged the actual event and did a bit of a historical deep dive analysis afterwards all for Radio New Zealand. While live blogging it, I had the strange sinking feeling that I was watching history, rather than just another forgettable debate. Here’s what I wrote, with gratuitous arcane Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson references galore!

• Biden vs Trump debate: What you need to know

• Live blog: Biden/Trump 2024 first debate

• Could Biden quit? It’s happened before

I’ve been watching presidential debates for 40 years now, ever since Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale crossed swords … and I’m afraid President Biden’s performance was the worst I’ve ever seen at one of them.

Will Biden hold the course or step aside? The clock is ticking and just over the last week, while I’ve been on a lovely holiday down south, the narrative keeps changing.

I gave up on making presidential predictions after the 2016 fiasco, and am not entirely sure what the coming days will hold – but I feel 90% sure that if Biden stays in, he actually lost the election on that June evening long before the first vote. It doesn’t matter how well he’s done or not, because, I think, for far too many voters, perception is everything. As far back as last Christmas I did not think Joe Biden should have run again and this whole year has been like a slow-motion car crash, but the thing about car crashes is sometimes, they don’t go quite like you think they would.

So it is with America, shakily, here in 2024. I wonder what precedented times feel like.

Happy 30th anniversary to my comic strip ‘Jip’!

To quote that band half my pals listened to nonstop back in the day, “What a long, strange trip it’s been…”

So it was 30 years ago this week that I started drawing a daily comic strip for The Daily Mississippian in my final year of university. Jip premiered on August 20, 1993 and ran for just about a year, 140 or so daily episodes of college hijinks heavily inspired by Doonesbury, Bloom County and Martin Wagner’s Hepcats.

I’ve written about my Jip days before and republished the strips as free PDF downloads a couple years back. (Advertorial: You can get Book 1 here and Book 2 here!) But, unlike my other comic Amoeba Adventures, I’ve never really returned to Jip in the years since I graduated – you can’t go back to college, after all.

Still, when I realised this week marked a whopping three decades since it kicked off, I couldn’t help but wonder what my wide-eyed dog-faced college freshman Jip would be up to in the strange world of 2023 – so here’s a special anniversary strip! If only we knew then what the future held…

I’ve already said everything I have to say about this guy

… I started to scribble a post about the first criminal indictment of an American President in history, about the seamy grifting, decades of corruption and braggart arrogance that brought everything to this point, but honestly, I’m sick to death of that idiot, and you probably are, too, and at this point I am utterly baffled, to the point of incoherence, at the notion that any sentient human being on the planet actually wants this undead ghoul, this endlessly returning shambling mass of all America’s worst and darkest instincts, this craven sack of nihilistic empty ego, to ever come anywhere near public office again.

Like, haven’t we all had enough?

I started to write something, anyway, and then realised that pretty much everything I wrote back in late 2020 is still very much true today, only perhaps more so. So read that instead:

We’re all still living in Nixonland

The year that Thanksgiving became Covidsgiving

Well, we tried. 

Our family managed to avoid the Covid-19 pandemic for almost three years, but our number finally came up during our overseas holiday visiting family in the US. We caught it in transit, somehow, despite wearing masks as much as possible. Like dominoes cascading downwards, once the first person tested positive the entire family shortly followed.  Thanksgiving became Covidsgiving.

Fortunately, we all caught a pretty mild case of the virus – good news as several folks in the family aren’t in the best of health and it was very worrying to see them test positive. It still sucked, particularly as it kind of mucked up our holiday, but after close watching of all the grim headlines the past few years I know it could’ve been so much worse. 

All journalists have cliches they loathe to see in print, and “post-pandemic” is one I’ve been kicking out of news copy every chance I get. We’re definitely post-lockdown – whatever your views on that, it’s clear the cultural buy-in for such policies has passed – but “post-pandemic” implies the disease has somehow gone away. If anything, far more people I know have been touched by Covid-19 in 2022 than at any time in the years prior. 

The virus felt particularly inescapable these past few months, when it seemed like every friend I knew in New Zealand caught it, especially many who had also managed to avoid it earlier on. It became pretty clear that no matter how hard we tried to do the right thing, we were probably going to get it eventually. 

A friendly acquaintance from my 1990s small press comics days, Andrew Ford, died of it in New York recently. An energetic booster of self-publishing comics and bringing rare art back into print, he was just 48 years old when he died. It’d been many years since we’d been in regular touch but it was still a shock to remember this go-getter kid I once knew and exchanged letters and drawings with and to realise he was one of the Covid casualties. I think of Andrew Ford often lately, and the millions of others whose stories have been cut short by Covid.

I traveled an awful lot at the beginning of this year as I first stepped outside the pandemic bubble of New Zealand. Despite having to deal with incredibly lengthy travel, quarantine back home in New Zealand and an Omicron surge, I somehow didn’t catch Covid. Yet this time when my family boarded the plane from NZ to the US, it wasn’t even 72 hours before the first of us tested positive. Both times, I and the rest of my family wore high quality masks. 

Last Christmas when I traveled the vast majority of people in transit in Los Angeles and elsewhere I went wore masks in crowded airports. But in November 2022, maybe 20% of the other people in the airport and planes were wearing masks. We tried our best, but when the majority of other people aren’t masking up… well, you get Covid, I guess. We’ll never know who we caught it from – was it the guy coughing a few rows up? Someone at the airport we passed by? It was such a mild case that the contact must have been fleeting. But I do wonder if that person had bothered to mask up in crowded public areas, our holiday might have turned out differently. Everyone’s sick and tired of all this, I get it, and a rugged, brutal individualism has replaced whatever fleeting community spirit first animated our Covid responses. You do you, and well, other people will do whatever.

One of the biggest knock-on effects of the Covid years for me has been a gradual lowering of my respect for other human beings. I hate that I’ve become more judgy, more annoyed at idiots going down conspiracy rabbit holes, pissed off at people flouting mask rules and everyone being outraged all the time – including myself. Many of the people I know who’ve caught Covid at last these recent months have expressed the same frustration – we tried, we did the right thing, we still caught it, so what’s the point?

Despite it all, it was still a good holiday – bonding with my parents and a new baby in the family and seeing the gorgeous colours of fall in California. The trees blazed up into autumn colours and the kinds of brilliant yellows, oranges and reds we just don’t see in our part of New Zealand.

At times the leaves fell in thick fluttering sheets, dotting the bright blue California skies with colour and reminding me that even in this age of outrage and plans never quite working out how you hoped, there are moments where you can still try to be a little more like one of those flimsy leaves, floating on the breeze and letting the sun shine on you while it can. There are no outraged leaves in nature.

Well, at least Liz Truss will go down in history

Watching British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s brief tenure go down in flames has been an exciting spectator sport. After a mere 45 days in office, she’s resigned, and while the debates over her car-crash of a tenure will be going on for some time, eventually, she’ll be a footnote – the shortest serving UK Prime Minister ever. At least she’ll have company, in that weird world of history’s short-timers.

In fact, Truss is not anywhere near the record set in other countries for the shortest leadership – the briefest US President lasted a mere 31 days, while in New Zealand, our shortest-serving Prime Minister was only 13 days. In Australia, it was just eight!

US President William Henry Harrison is a footnote in Trivial Pursuit games. He died a mere month after his inauguration, the then-oldest US president at the age of 68, after giving a nearly two-hour inauguration speech in the freezing cold. His health declined over his short term, not helped by a habit of going for long walks without a coat or hat in wintry March weather. Because it was 1841, his treatment during his illness consisted of fun things like enemas, “cupping,” castor oil, opium, and a lovely cocktail of camphor, wine and brandy. It didn’t help. He lingered until April 4, 1841, only his 31st day in office. He gets points for what is perhaps the most “I love my job” deathbed speech of all time – “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of government; I wish them carried out, I ask nothing more.” 

Harrison’s death has long been attributed to pneumonia, but more recent research has found it might have been some kind of enteric fever, spawned by Washington’s then literal swamps. He didn’t leave a whole lot of accomplishments other than running what might be considered the first “modern” campaign, yet his death, the first of a US President in office, did help establish the precedent of the Vice-President becoming President. Many thought John Tyler should only become an “acting President” but he simply assumed the full office, which is how it’s worked ever since. 

Henry Sewell, considering career options.

Here in New Zealand our shortest serving leaders have mostly been during the earlier days of British colonial government. Henry Sewell was New Zealand’s first premier, Prime Minister or “colonial secretary” from May 7 to 20, 1856, during the very earliest days of our colonial government – “he was too reserved and elitist for the rough and tumble of colonial politics, as the brevity of his premiership showed.” Other earlier PMs had pretty short terms as well. In modern times, the late Mike Moore served for only 59 days in 1990 before his Labour Party was voted out of office. Despite his short term, he went on to have a pretty solid career in world politics and was given that crowning kiwi accolade when he died at age 71 – “an everyday bloke.”

Across the ditch, there’s certainly been a lot of turnover in Australia’s Prime Ministers, including what I believe is the only Prime Minister ever lost at sea, but they’ve got work to do to catch up with poor Frank Forde, who only lasted 8 days in 1945. He became Prime Minister when John Curtin died suddenly, but a week later his Labor Party picked someone else to lead, and well, it was farewell, Forde. 

Few will mourn Liz Truss’s brief term as Prime Minister, but its mere brevity indicates she’ll go down in history for one thing, at least – just maybe not the way she wanted. 

Everything I need to know about America I learned from ‘Doonesbury’

I’ve written before about how I miss when newspaper comics were a bit more central in pop culture. And few have been more topical and controversial than Garry Trudeau’s venerable daily Doonesbury, still going strong, if less frequently, after 50-plus years. 

For nerdy kids like me who grew up reading the comics pages and scouring thrift shops for old paperbacks, Doonesbury was our political education. The first Doonesbury book I remember picking up was 1981’s “In Search of Reagan’s Brain,”  a pointed if often mystifying to me satire of the then-new US President’s penchant for vagueness and nostalgia. I barely knew who Reagan was at my tender age, but something about the complicated, arcane world of Doonesbury made me want to get the joke. 

Later, I bought classic treasury collections like “The Doonesbury Chronicles,” which awakened me to strange early ‘70s concepts like communes and Walden Pond, or to Nixon and Ford and the Watergate figures. There were the just plain funny strips, but then there were the ones that made me want to learn more to get the references. 

Pre-internet, the past was a rather mysterious country, and to be honest, my history classes that I recall of primary and high school education always seemed to focus on the really distant past, on Founding Fathers and constitutional principles and occasionally something as fresh as World War II.

Little was taught about injustice, or racism, or the many wrongs and missteps in America’s long, tangled history. Doonesbury had Black, Asian and gay characters long before it was common. Through Doonesbury, I learned that America was always many things at the same time, and the obscure political and cultural figures of 1975 and 1984 it stuck in my head made me want to learn more about it all in my own time. 

But Doonesbury would never have lasted if it was just a blithe satire of the news of the day, and it was the characters who kept me coming back for more – everyman Mike Doonesbury’s journey from idealistic student to ‘80s ad man to ‘00s digital hipster to today’s almost senior citizen, football player turned wounded veteran B.D., eternal hippie Zonker, Hunter Thompson stand-in Duke (who became rather tiresome through overuse), or fiery campus protester Mark’s long journey to coming out.

Doonesbury always felt kind of like the story of a family as it journeyed through five decades of America, and that human touch is what made me want to learn more about the years it spanned. 

Doonesbury is still going 51 years on – longer than Schulz did Peanuts now – although it’s been new strips on Sundays only since 2014 or so which makes it feel like it’s entered a slow final victory lap around the cultural arena. Trudeau’s been viciously funny with the Tr**p years but it’s a lot harder to pay attention in the Age of Outrage. Mike and the gang are still around, and they’ve got children, and their children even have children as Doonesbury turns sweetly generational. 

I guess I know more about how the US and the world works now in my own encroaching middle age, and there’s certainly no shortage of places one can pick up history and knowledge now, but I’ll always kind of long for the days when Trudeau’s characters were my newsprint guides to the follies and foibles of the wider world.