The dangers of verbosity

In his robust years, Joe Biden got criticized not for speaking haltingly as if confused, but for talking too much as if full of himself.

That largely was the reason he got eliminated early the first two times he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In 1988, it turned out that his stirring campaign riff about his humble background was borrowed liberally from the phrasing of British Labor politician Neil Kinnock. He had quoted Kinnock by name in previous speeches, but, pressed by time limits on his closing statement in a debate, he didn’t. He said he forgot. The competing Michael Dukakis campaign, to which Biden was the chief rival, pressed the issue of plagiarism. Biden dropped out.

In 2008, in another debate in Iowa, Biden was asked if he had the ability to stop himself from talking too much. He said “yes,” and shut up. It got a nice laugh, but maybe not enough people believed it. He got the support of less than 1 percent of Iowa’s

Democratic caucus-goers in a race split three ways by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Biden dropped out that night.

I was told years ago by someone in a position to know that, while on a foreign fact-finding mission, senators including Biden were told not to ask a foreign leader about a certain sensitive subject in their imminent meeting, and that Biden opened the meeting by asking the foreign leader why he would have been officially discouraged moments before from asking that very thing.

I’m not saying that was bad or wrong. I’m saying it was verbose and against advice.

So, along that line, Biden delivered an important address in Poland last week regarding Vladimir Putin’s war criminality in Ukraine. Biden had a fine, carefully edited script, and he read the teleprompter well enough. But then, suddenly, when nearly finished, he revisited the robust verbosity of his youth. He went off-script to say these nine words about Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

It was an example of what I’ve heard called “podium policy.” That’s when a politician gets carried away at the podium and, for rhetorical flourish, says something exceeding established policy and seeming to declare a new policy.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he wouldn’t have used Biden’s phrasing considering that he maintained hope for negotiations and because a heated new issue—such as the West’s wanting Putin removed from office as part of any deal—could complicate those discussions. Many foreign-policy experts at home and abroad said the same thing.

No one was saying they didn’t share Biden’s sentiment.

So, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House aides began a process called “walking back.” They said Biden was speaking not of policy, but from the heart, and referring not to evicting Putin from Moscow but keeping him from exercising additional power.

Again, what Biden said was, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Spokesmen working under Biden in the American government were basically saying the president spoke from his heart but that his heart had nothing to do with the unchanged official policy.

That was just Joe talking—that was the story basically.

On Monday, Biden seemed to remain bold by declaring that he was “not walking anything back.” But then he explained that he said what he thinks and wasn’t changing that, but that what he thinks does not alter any official policy.

And Biden made a good point. It was that it wasn’t credible to think Putin might become somehow even more unreasonable only because of a few new disapproving words from the American president. Putin’s lack of reason and American disapproval are fully established facts.

It could turn out, then, that Biden didn’t so much err in podium policy but succeed in podium sentiment— that he let this evil adversary know precisely how the American president feels about him even as we and our allies won’t actually try to oust his government as a condition of peace.

Maybe we could reach some terms with Putin by which genocide stops in Ukraine, after which the Russian people would get rid of him.

In that case Biden would have talked just the right amount. That would be historic, if mildly ironic.