"If what you’re saying is right, that Biden did something really heroic by stepping aside, offering the Party and the country the best chance to beat Donald Trump in November..."

"... I think what irks me is my fear that the people around Biden, and you can include yourself or not, but his staff, his friends, his family, would not be denouncing it as a giant risk to the Republic if he had decided to stick it out. I feel like they would be showing loyalty to him more than to the needs of the country."

Isaac Chotiner asked Jon Meacham, in "Was Biden’s Decision to Withdraw 'Heroic'? Jon Meacham, the President’s friend and informal adviser, considers his legacy" (The New Yorker).

What do expect Jon Meacham, the President's friend, to say? He says: "I think your being irked is now a hypothetical.... I totally get what you’re saying. But the fact of the matter is that the decision has been made.... I’m not minimizing the concern you’re articulating. I’m not dismissing it. It is totally legitimate. I absolutely see how people would be wrestling with that. But in point of fact, it’s no longer an issue...."

It's not a hypothetical when looking backward into the many months when Biden was sticking it out and his staff, his friends, his family, and others, including Kamala Harris, were showing loyalty to him more than to the needs of the country. Was it not a great scandal?

"Historians advise the president. The problem? The scholars were all white."

Headline at NPR for a piece written by Sandhya Dirks. 

We're told that a few weeks before his blood-red "soul of America" speech, "the president met with a group of handpicked historians who told him that democracy was teetering, hanging on by a thread." And:

Who wrote Joe Biden's blood-red "soul of America" speech? Jon "Soul of America" Meacham?

I should have guessed, because I've blogged about Meacham's input into Biden rhetoric a few times, but I needed this Politico article to jog my memory: "The seeds of Biden’s democracy speech sprouted long before the Mar-a-Lago search/But the actions of Trump and his supporters, along with threats of violence, sped up Biden’s need to address the nation."

"Democracy speech"? Is that what they want it called? The speech where he demonized half of American voters?

President Joe Biden’s speech warning about an assault against American democracy — by Donald Trump and his core followers — was an election-season call to arms unlike anything in modern American history.

Ugh! Warning us about our fellow citizens. Accusing us of "assault." Claiming to represent "democracy." I hope that was "unlike anything in modern American history," because it was horrible.

"[Biden] spent most of his career as a bit of an outsider to Washington’s social world, his face pressed against the glass."

"The cool kids, including President Barack Obama, occasionally mocked him behind his back for his cornball earnestness. Mr. Trump’s obsession with the media took the form of constant, obstreperous complaints and news-making leaks, a style Mr. Biden has suggested he finds merely embarrassing. Mr. Biden sought their approval with a more diligent and solicitous approach. As vice president, for instance, he was particularly attentive to the wise men of Washington, especially the foreign policy columnists David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The Times. Mr. Biden liked nothing more than a wide-ranging, high-minded conversation about world affairs after he had returned from a trip to China or India. It seems that what Donald Trump did for the once-dying industry of cable news, Joe Biden may do for the dusty old newspaper column.... Mr. Trump has also gotten us all used to an extraordinary, if inadvertent, level of transparency. He rarely resisted answering shouted, timely questions, and his leaky White House offered journalists and their audience an X-ray portrait of a government running off the rails...."

Writes Ben Smith in "Get Me Meacham! Biden Brings Back the Media’s Good Old Days/The next president promises to do for old-line newspaper columnists what Donald Trump did for cable/What a time to be George Will!" (NYT).

I've been reading traditional media all along and can't stand cable news. I've followed Trump directly, reading his tweets and watching his rallies and press conferences. But will the people who've binged on cable news switch back to traditional print media like Newsweek and The New York Times just because Biden isn't keeping cable news fueled with hot tweets and video clips? It's not as though people need to consume news. They can pick video games or super-hero movies. There's all kinds of fast food for the mind. And if for some reason people want something more sober and intellectual, there are all kinds of heavier TV shows — "The Crown"! — and an endless supply of substantial books — Obama's memoir! 

We don't need the latest news — especially when it's dull — to be analyzed more deeply or pseudo-deeply. We're free to branch out to more interesting things. And we can still listen to Trump, who is likely to become even funnier and wilder. 

"A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everyone."

 

That's the bit from "Grapes of Wrath" that I wasn't able to recite off the top of my head as I was recording my podcast yesterday and got to the item about the historian Jon Meacham, who'd helped write Joe Biden's victory speech.  Meacham has a book titled "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels" and Biden's speech expressed a desire "to rebuild the soul of America." 

Here's the post I was reading in the podcast, and here's the podcast. At 21:40, I begin speaking extemporaneously: 

"I want to get into this idea of 'the soul of America'.... What do you think of the idea that a country has a soul?... I like to think of the idea that individual human beings have a soul, and when I hear of this composite soul of an entire country, I'm skeptical.... That's what makes me think of fascism.... especially if you're not acknowledging the soul of individual people, and so often, from the Democratic side, I get the sense that they view their opponents as being soulless... and I feel that they're also antagonistic to individualism. Everyone needs to think the same thing, and people should be cancelled if they don't all say the same thing.... I read that as a rejection of the sense that individual people have a soul, and then you come at this with the idea that America has a soul. There's just an Oversoul to America. I know you can go very deeply into that. It reminds me of that speech in 'The Grapes of Wrath'... and I know there's some Emerson stuff you could put there. But I'm not writing a post. I'm doing a podcast. So I can't get into the research and come up with stuff. But if I were reading and writing right now and not talking — and this is the advantage of reading and writing — I would research those things, and I would add a few little things,  but why don't you go do it? You go read that."

Here's the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, "The Over-Soul." Excerpt:

Presidential historian Jon Meacham was speechwriting for Joe Biden and (apparently) did not disclose it to MSNBC.

And MSNBC has cut him off as a paid contributor, according to Fox News. 

Meacham worked on Biden's victory speech and then appeared on MSNBC commenting on the speech. MSNBC's Brian Williams asked him, "I’m not the historian that you are, and I don’t have the Pulitzer that you do, but do you concur that is the way we are used to hearing from our presidents?" To which Meacham responded, "Absolutely."

The implication of the question — as I see it there, out of context — is that Trump didn't speak in the conventional presidential way, and Biden restores the appropriate tone for the presidency. It's pretty awful to go on TV and comment on a speech that you wrote as if you were just hearing it.

Here's the NYT article from yesterday that made the disclosure of Meacham's speechwriting role: "Helping to Shape the Words of the President-Elect: A Presidential Historian/Jon Meacham, best known for writing about past presidents like Andrew Jackson and George Bush, has helped shape some of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most significant speeches."

In [his victory speech], Mr. Biden spoke of a mission “to rebuild the soul of America, to rebuild the backbone of this nation, the middle class, and to make America respected around the world again” and was widely credited with striking the right tone about bringing the country back together. The language echoed the title of Mr. Meacham’s 2018 book, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” which has long served as a touchstone for Mr. Biden, who has reached out to Mr. Meacham in the past to discuss passages he liked....

It's very nice for Biden to read a book about America's soul and to want to get some of that high-flown rhetoric into his speeches, but the aspiration toward loftiness is shot to hell if Meacham goes on TV to admire what he's not telling us is his own work!

"The spectacle of assassination belonged more to the worlds of ancient Rome and the kingdoms of Europe, where struggles for power..."

"... between monarchs, aristocrats, and the populace often led to plots and upheavals. Randolph’s attack exacerbated the sense among Jackson’s critics that the president had become a king, the White House a court, and Washington a conspiratorial capital."

From "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," by Jon Meacham.

Randolph was "a disturbed former navy officer, Robert B. Randolph," who, on May 6, 1833, "on a steamboat excursion to Fredericksburg, Virginia... came through the crowd... [and] leaped at the president as though to assault him." We're told that "Randolph bloodied Jackson’s face, but the president’s stare stopped the assailant. "

It was the first such physical assault on an American president...

An admirer of the president’s from Alexandria, Virginia, offered to avenge the attack. “Sir, if you will pardon me in case I am tried and convicted, I will kill Randolph for this insult to you, in fifteen minutes!” Jackson demurred. “No, sir, I cannot do that,” he replied. “I want no man to stand between me and my assailants, and none to take revenge on my account.” He [said] that if he had been standing rather than sitting behind the table, Randolph “never would have moved with life from the tracks he stood in.”.... He did not want, he said, “a military guard around the President,” which left only this option: officials, he said, had “to be prepared … [to] shoot down or otherwise destroy those dastardly assassins whenever they approach us.”

"My dad wanted to name me Steak, the food, because he loves it so much. But my mom was never going to go for it."

Said Hopper Penn, the 22-year-old son of Sean Penn. I'm running across this today because I was looking for reviews of "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House" and stumbled into the information that HBO is turning the book into a miniseries and the role of President Jackson is played by Sean Penn. It makes sense, no?

By the way, the story as told in "American Lion" seems to be 50% about whether this one lady (Margaret Eaton) was a slut.



Anyway, I can't find much info about the HBO series. Couldn't see who was playing Eaton or anybody else except Jackson. But I did run into that fascinating factoid about Sean Penn's son's name not being Steak but Hopper. Hopper was named after Dennis Hopper, the actor, not the painter Edward Hopper.

I did find the NYT review of the book "American Lion." I especially enjoyed this:

“American Lion” is enormously entertaining, especially in the deft descriptions of Jackson’s personality and domestic life in his White House. But [the author Jon] Meacham has missed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of American populism as personified by Jackson. What does it mean to have a president who believes that the people are a unified whole whose essence can be distilled into the pronouncements of one man? Populist resentment is to democracies as air is to fire. But republics may endure best when leaders remain uncertain — as several dozen did in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — as to whether the people can be entirely trusted with their own government. 

That was published November 14, 2008, when we'd just elected Barack Obama.