O kay, it’s official: from now on, to the grief of people who care about such things,
“transition” can be used as a verb. The epochal clincher came about two thirds of the way through what a luckier future than I expect may recall as The Last Debate, when Joe Biden averred that should he win, his administration will be “transitioning from fossil fuels.” That phrasing was just doubtful enough that a determined prevaricator could make it out to mean nearly anything, particularly to an audience that probably thinks “fossil fuels” means old jerricans of Esso buried in the backyard near the fallout shelter, and Trump instantly pounced, gleefully challenging Biden to repeat the statement in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas. Within two hours Fox, judging by what I could bear to watch, was retailing the remark as “a huge gift,” a great game-changing blunder that would be instrumental in handing Trump a second term as the Republic belatedly came to its senses and realized that, really now, life without coal plants and gas guzzlers and lethal warming is simply unimaginable. There’s no telling yet what Trump 2020 will do with the sound byte, but it seems likely that they will make out “transitioning from” to mean something like “terminate with extreme prejudice.”
But so far the damage has been minimal. Biden explained himself more or less satisfactorily just after the debate. Of course he does not propose anything like an instant shutdown of the whole carbon economy, as if such a thing were imaginable sans pillage, famine, and mass death. His true position has been posted at his website for months. His “transitional presidency” will merely, modestly aim for a future that arrives at carbon neutrality by 2050. He’ll be long under daisies by then, as probably so will you, and we can let the kids work out the details.
So far, nearly two days into the aftergaffe, the surprising thing is how readily this gloss – excuse, if you must – is being accepted. People may be learning how to listen to Joe Biden. They no longer expect him to hit the nail on the head; if he is just swinging in its general direction, they will do the rest, trusting his big (though often slightly confused) heart. Inshallah, they are simultaneously learning to mistrust Trump’s indisputably quick tongue and the frightening vacuum in his chest.
But for a minute, there, how I missed Pete Buttigieg! Oh, Pete, where were you, with your eerie gift for cut-to-the-minute bon mots, always just ahead of the beat, surgically precise, germane as sniper fire? You would never have stumbled as Biden did, flagging visibly in the debate’s second hour, too often losing himself in a flurry of false starts, self-revisions, and flat-out stutters. You would never have blanked on the name of Kim Jong Un, a stunning lapse even for Biden. You, Pete, would have soldiered straight on, rapping out the right words for the right points, one after another, always on the money, calm and dry as a twelve-month Jeopardy champ taking a busload of spelling bee finalists on a field trip, until, in fact, you began to seem a little like an android.
But for that matter Warren, Sanders, Yang, Klobuchar, Steyer, Harris on a good night, even Cory Booker – any of that old crowd from the glory days, about a year ago, when greatness in 2020 was still a dream – would mostly have said what Biden meant at any point far better than Biden did. In these signature ordeals of modern politics, our high-stakes rhetorical gladiator bouts, time is everything. Seconds lost stammering, rephrasing, changing tacks, and straining for vocabulary and details that just won’t come (though they are unmistakably in there somewhere) will not be refunded. The other guy tags his bases and you don’t and that’s that.
But Biden got off one of his best lines of the night when he murmured, half apologetically, “I beat all those guys.” Just that, leaving you to ponder all that that implied. Another time, wonderfully, with a grin worth 100K votes in Wisconsin, he jerked a thumb at Trump and quipped, “He’s a very confused guy. He thinks he’s running against someone else. He’s running against Joe Biden.”
Average those other guys together – the orators, the overachievers, the Rhodes Scholars and early bloomers – and Biden, somehow or other, is your result: bumbling good-hearted Joe, the stutterer never quite on point (though always smarter than he seems), implacably centrist, late to the dance, no one’s first choice, no one’s dream, but unquestionably our very best hope in a dark and painful time. Sir Joe of the Least Common Denominator.
On to November! — and then a Walter Mitty presidency that may surprise everyone.
Vote.
