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It is not nice to pick on politicians or anyone else for suffering one or two ‘senior moments’. But sometimes they are telling.
Yesterday when Joe Biden spoke his cue aloud – ‘four more years, pause’ – not only did he remind listeners of a certain age of one of the more memorable lines of Leonid Brezhnev – a phonetic reading of the Olympics symbol, as in ‘welcome, dear athletes, to Moscow, oooooh!’ – but he also left us with a phrase that probably won’t go away.
Imagine what people will say if this summer’s Party conventions see violence like that in Chicago in 1968. Imagine if, at the same time, the first American body bags start coming back from Ukraine, Palestine, etc. Imagine if the National Guard adds university campuses and other places to the subways it’s already started policing. Is a state of emergency that remote a possibility? Certainly not after 6 January 2021.
Four more years, pause.
Regencies are precarious arrangements. More so when it’s difficult to tell who the regent is. Most people knew who was actually running the government during the Wilson, Nixon, Reagan, and George W Bush regencies. Who is doing it today? It’s not easy to say. There appears to be something like a Burns-Sullivan co-regency. If so, it does not give us confidence because both men are known for getting the big things wrong even if they have some talent for (eventually) getting the little things right. The future of the American Republic is not a little thing.
A pause might not be such a bad idea.