Biden: Superhero, lame duck or both?
WASHINGTON: So what do Americans see in Joe Biden - a doddery has-been whom even his own party doesn’t want around, or an improbable superhero? After an extraordinary week in Washington politics, the answer is a bit of both. The 79-year-old’s political obituary has been issued more times than can be counted since he took office in 2021 amid the political wreckage of Donald Trump’s presidency, a pandemic and fear of economic disaster. Now he’s fighting back. Or at least his alter-ego, a comically sinister cartoon character dubbed “Dark Brandon” is.
In political nerd circles, the meme has been doing the rounds - and it started going viral on Twitter this week as Biden notched win after against-the-odds win. The “Dark Brandon” character was originally invented on Twitter by depressed leftists, angry that their centrist president was failing to get things done. They called him Brandon in a nod to a separate, vulgar Republican meme using the same name - and added death ray eyes.
But all of a sudden, mainstream Democrats are embracing “Dark Brandon” as their own, rebranding him from ineffectual grandfather figure to a kind of political terminator. “Dark Brandon cannot be stopped,” reads one caption over a portrait of Biden with deeply tanned skin and fiery yellow eyes. Another version depicts a photoshopped Biden capturing lightning in his hands, white light shooting from his eyes.
Check the headlines: - Friday, Biden gets a blockbuster jobs report showing US unemployment back to a half-century low. - Late Thursday, the final holdout Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, blesses a vast spending package for historic investment in fighting climate change, as well as lowering costs in the ruinously expensive health system.
Monday, Biden announces the United States has killed Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the last big name of the 9/11era Al-Qaeda leadership. A few days before that, Congress passes a $52 billion investment package boosting semiconductor manufacturing. Oh, there’s also this week’s bill passed to compensate military veterans exposed to toxins, a cause dear to Biden’s heart.
And all that with a tiny Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and only one extra vote in the Senate. Biden isn’t the reincarnation - as he reportedly would like to be - of his hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, who rebuilt the United States in the Great Depression, tweeted Slate political writer
Jordan Weissmann. “But as of now it looks like Biden’s first term could be on par w/ Obama’s when it comes to significant achievements, and with a much smaller majority.”
Not so fast say Republicans, some of whom literally portray Biden as a mentally incompetent puppet of farleftist handlers. Ronny Jackson - a former White House physician who famously praised Trump’s “good genes” and suggested the obese Republican had the capacity to live to 200 - has caused a stir by going on Fox News and other right-wing outlets to diagnose Biden with “cognitive failures.” — AFP