The summer of political whiplash in the US was one we will never forget. In the last week of June I was guest curator of the Aspen Ideas Festival. The defining vignette was the jolly debate-night watch we planned, which, from the first ashen glimpse of Joe Biden at the mic speaking in a Mr Creakle whisper, turned into a Democratic wake punctuated by the occasional broken sob in the audience.
Ten weeks later, the whole world has changed as Dems hum joyously along to Kamalot. Kamala Harris’s inspired vice-presidential pick, cosy Middle American dad Tim Walz of Minnesota, “looks like home”, as the still-intuitive Bill Clinton told his friend Paul Begala.
One of the most heartening images of summer’s end was Biden sprawled in a lounge chair on Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, eyes closed, mouth sagging open, allowed to be an 81-year-old geezer at last. The sight of the president trying not to show his age has often been more distressing than the pivotal moment at the debate when those efforts failed. The stiff-legged, tin-soldier walk, the cut-aways from stumbles off stage, Jill Biden’s solicitous eyes, the repetition of his achievements with the quavering boast of “I’m the guy who…”.
The portrait in the attic
No country is harder on looking old than the United States. Even as boomers surge into senility with unceasing appetites for luxury holidays, they are still largely spurned by marketers obsessed with the cool factor. Voters have long made it clear where they stand. In a 2023 Joel Benenson poll, respondents favoured an upper age limit of 70 for any person to be sworn in as president. The painful national obsession with Biden’s age perhaps adds to an intensifying masculine unease with the need to look youthful. This month’s Town & Country magazine notes that, according to the American Academy of Plastic Surgeons, cosmetic procedures on men increased 207 per cent between 2019 and 2022. (After decades of bumping into well-heeled women rendered unrecognisable by surgical enhancement, it’s a little gratifying we are now in the era of “weren’t you the guy who…”.) For Biden, no amount of hair plugs or brow lifts that pulled his face almost past his hairline was ever going to disguise the time-stamp of his decline.
The Kamala craze
Nothing turns Donald Trump into an exploding toad faster than the loss of the spotlight. The sulphurous rants he unleashed on Truth Social included calling for the execution of his enemies and reposting a tweet by some Maga random of an old picture of Kamala and Hillary together captioned: “Funny how blowjobs impacted their careers differently…”
Trump 2.0 isn’t just a boor, he’s a bore. He’s looking as passé as Meghan Markle’s podcast career, while Harris is the sizzling trailer of a new show we’re praying will be as good as it looks. Her crushingly anodyne first interview on CNN last week may, alas, have answered that question. Reliance on her “values” over policies or ideas confirmed what everyone already knew before she was deified: Kamala is no conviction politician. To which one can only counter that it’s better than being a convicted politician. Let’s hope it’s enough to keep the momentum going.
Diplomatic baggage
With two polar-opposite politicians arm-wrestling for the White House, who should Keir Starmer send to be his man in Washington to replace the popular Karen Pierce? (Most bets are on David Miliband, Jonathan Powell or Peter Mandelson.) In strict diplomatic terms, it shouldn’t matter who wins the US presidency, though of course it does, as the former ambassador Kim Darroch discovered when he fell foul of Trump. Whoever is chosen will have to reckon with the fact that the UK’s image has shrunk almost to the point of irrelevance. For Americans who admire everything outsized, from a nearly 3-tonne Tesla cyber-truck to American footballer Travis Kelce’s 110kg muscle mass, the UK’s choice to make itself smaller with Brexit and lose its seat at the European table – its main point of utility in Washington – remains unfathomable. Upper-class faux self-deprecation isn’t an idiom that works in the capital of self-promotion, which is why Americans never “got” Boris Johnson and why there was no time to even learn the names of the two who stumbled into No 10 after him.
Starmer’s glum speech on 27 August about “tough choices” and the “rubble and ruin” left by the Tories only added more chiaroscuro to the other fact that has reached Americans lately: Britain is broke. It’s not exactly a James Bond calling card for the new ambassador. Perhaps the job search needs to be redefined: “Wanted: accomplished salesman of distressed assets, owner of refurbished dinner jacket, who doesn’t bang on about the Special Relationship.”
[See also: Donald Trump is losing it]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire