No one would ever accuse Joe Biden of being Extremely Online.
As a candidate, he strongly implied that he was not especially excited by social media. In a reversal of the standard way of the political world, his aides made it known that a communications team crafted his tweets and posts, not Biden himself. His campaign focused on winning local TV markets, not winning the morning with the Twitter cognoscenti and the “Morning Joe” regulars on MSNBC.
In an age of micro news cycles that come and go like puffs of wind — and running against an incumbent president who tweeted in any respect hours, about whatever looked as if it would cross his mind — Biden’s fuddy-duddy approach to the trendy news media offered an implicit promise to voters: I’ll be the treatment to the way in which that Donald Trump lives rent-free in your heads.
In the course of the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, a Biden adviser vented to Ryan Lizza, my former colleague at Politico, about how Biden’s extremely offline persona was actshually part and parcel of his winning strategy of appealing to what political operatives often confer with as “the normies.”
Those normal voters weren’t glued to their phones all day; they were doing “normal” American things like traipsing off to work, searching for groceries, calling their grandkids, watching “Wheel of Fortune” and customarily going about their lives without following the newest memes or chattering-class obsessions du jour.
“I get this query on a regular basis: Why does the press hate him a lot?” the aide told Lizza. “And the reply is because they’re younger and so they want someone cooler.”
Initially, let’s make one thing clear: The press doesn’t “hate” Joe Biden. But this unidentified aide’s point was that, in lavishing attention on more energizing candidates like Pete Buttigieg or more fashionable pols on the left like Bernie Sanders, elite reporters and cable talking heads were missing Biden’s real appeal to the older voters who make up the bottom of the Democratic Party — and who would find yourself lifting him to the nomination.
It was a chin-out expression of confidence in Biden’s political strategy at a time when the consequence of the first was uncertain. However it also betrayed enduring, Rodney Dangerfield-esque feelings of resentment amongst his advisers that Biden don’t get no respect amongst media tastemakers and pundits.
“Individuals who went through the first and the final election with him learned to take this longer view of the vicissitudes of the political news cycle,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser.
She added that, for all of the criticism of the president’s age — he’ll be 79 in November — and the a long time he’s spent within the Senate and as vice chairman, his years of experience in Washington had given him a “wisdom” and a patience in regards to the rhythms of deal-making in Congress that may be hard to copy.
At times, the Biden team’s resentment of what it sees because the press and pundit class’s constant underestimation of his political instincts and skills has burst into public view.
The Biden Presidency
With midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.
One incident from the first stands out. In January 2020, in a sit-down interview with the editorial board of this newspaper, Biden blurted out: “I ain’t dead and I’m not going to die!”
The Recent York Times editorial board (which is totally walled off from the news operation, where I work) decided to endorse each Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar as a substitute of Biden, a Solomonic exercise that infuriated his team.
In response, the Biden campaign released a video of a gushing encounter he had with Jacquelyn Brittany, a security guard who had escorted the candidate as much as the Times boardroom for his interview. Brittany returned through the Democratic convention to nominate Biden, a story his aides fed prematurely to The Washington Post.
Inside Biden’s campaign, his phrase — “I ain’t dead and I’m not going to die!” — became something of an internal mantra, an expression of the grit with which aides felt they approached an election during which they were never accorded the respect they were due.
So, to me, it was especially interesting to look at as White House officials recently began to embrace “Dark Brandon” — a palimpsest of an online meme that has been painted over with almost impenetrable layers of online irony.
Persist with me here as I try to elucidate it, briefly.
The online roots of ‘Dark Brandon’
The series of memes, in accordance with sites that track such things, has wended its way from sarcastic jokes about Biden’s supposed dementia to, now, a bear hug by the very team that also goes by the maxim “Twitter isn’t real life.”
It began within the winter as a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of “Let’s Go Brandon” — a right-wing catchphrase that developed from a TV commentator’s mischaracterization of what the group at a NASCAR race was saying about Biden (hint: a rude insult) into a whole ecosystem of coy bumper stickers and T-shirts.
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The repackaging of the “Brandon” slogan soon combined with the “Dark MAGA” meme, which had grown popular amongst online conservatives and roughly conveys the message that Trump and his most loyal supporters are plotting a vengeful comeback.
Highly stylized images of the present president featuring an otherworldly glow or red laser beams coming out of his eyes, often including stock Biden phrases like “No malarkey,” began popping up in meme factories like 4Chan, a rowdy web messaging board, or on Twitter.
On the time, Biden was struggling to pass his agenda on Capitol Hill. But because the president has began to rack up legislative victories and favorable jobs numbers, Democratic Twitterati began jettisoning the irony and embracing the meme wholeheartedly.
The White House jumped on board early this month, with several aides tweeting out Dark Brandon images after a spate of fine news for Biden:
Contained in the White House, the towel-snapping Dark Brandon tweets were an expression of a changing mood after months and months of feeling besieged by coverage of Biden’s lousy poll numbers, his struggles to tame inflation and the predilection amongst Beltway insiders for prematurely declaring Biden’s political demise.
The president himself has seen a number of the Dark Brandon memes and located them funny, in accordance with several people near him.
“The Dark Brandon memes are a light-weight tackle the incontrovertible fact that Biden actually has abilities and power that almost all elected officials don’t — and he yields it in his own way,” said Greg Schultz, who led Biden’s 2020 campaign through the Democratic primary and has occasionally been critical of the White House.
And additionally they served to mock the Extremely Online right, whose obsession with concepts like “memetic warfare” has indelibly shaped the political conversation on this country and beyond.
Most of all, the memes were a subtle reminder to the press that, collectively, it doesn’t at all times get Biden right — and that, within the view of his staff, the president is playing a protracted game that doesn’t at all times jibe with the frenetic rhythms of the web news cycle.
The president nodded to those sentiments on Tuesday through the signing ceremony for the Inflation Reduction Act. As Manchin stood behind him within the State Dining Room of the White House, hovering near the ceremonial desk used for such occasions, the president said, “Joe, I never had a doubt.”
For now, quite a lot of this mood shift remains to be just what the Gen Z folks on the market might call “vibes.”
Biden’s poll numbers have gone up, but not by much.
Tuesday’s election ends in Alaska and Wyoming suggest that Donald Trump stays probably the most potent force in Republican politics, and that — as of today, a minimum of — he would enter a hypothetical 2024 rematch against Biden along with his party solidly behind him.
Inflation can have peaked, nevertheless it stays at or near record highs, and it stays to be seen how actual voters will process the changing narrative in Washington come November. Republicans may yet win over significant numbers of centrist voters with their arguments on cultural issues like transgender rights or the teaching of race and gender in schools.
Biden’s allies are painfully aware, too, of just how fickle the conversation across the president could be.
“I promise you,” Schultz said. “In six months, quite a lot of the media and D.C. elite can be complaining about Biden again.”
What to read
— Blake
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