Biden Doesn't Have the Juice

There is no will or courage inside the White House. This is simply who Joe Biden is.

(Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the worst car rides I have ever been on was in Indonesia at some point in 2013 when I and about six other tourists found ourselves in a large van traveling from somewhere around Mount Bromo to the central Java city of Yogyakarta. The trip was supposed to take six hours by car. But there was something wrong with our driver: he was very ill, and apparently very tired. For 12 hours, he drove at approximately 30 kilometers an hour or slower along mostly-clear roads, only pressing his foot on the accelerator at intervals of 2-3 seconds, resulting in a wavelike rocking motion, because he kept drifting off behind the wheel every few seconds and then waking up and braking before accelerating again. He was also coughing horribly, a wet consuming cough that sounded serious.

I was sitting in the front seat beside him for most of those 12 hours. I did everything I could to alleviate some of these symptoms — I passed him snacks, nudged him to drink caffeinated drinks, made wild offers through a combination of broken English and pantomiming for him to pull over and rest, to find another driver, or just to pass the wheel to me while he got some sleep in the passenger seat. But the driver said no. He was obstinate and determined to stay behind the wheel. His situation was desperate enough that any one of these remedies could have made some measurable improvement in the conditions of every occupant of the vehicle; it was also longstanding enough that he surely must have known on some level that he was unfit for the job. And so we all suffered.

I have been thinking about this car ride frequently because in some ways it is a good metaphor for what living in America under Joe Biden is like today.

There are parts where the metaphor doesn’t quite fit, of course — the driver in my story was likely financially motivated to do his job in a way Biden is not, and no one in the van was actively trying to hijack it so they could eject half the passengers and make it a White Person Only Car — but in both instances, we are presented with a situation in which the person in control is old, sick, tired, and seemingly incompetent, resulting in an enormous amount of anxiety and suffering for everyone involved. In Indonesia, as I was riding shotgun, I was one of the first to notice this. In America, everyone is figuring it out at their own pace, but this knowledge appears to have finally reached the back seats of the Democratic party.