From Tommy Christopher:
Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m no expert on the mind of the average voter, or even the average Democratic voter, but my first two reactions to this interaction were “Jesus, Biden is going to get killed for this!”, followed immediately by “Eff that guy!”
The more I saw it, the more I loved it, because this guy wasn’t just some voter with an honest disagreement with Biden, he was a supporter of another campaign (Elizabeth Warren’s) who got up and mocked the former VP’s age, then lied about him. As Biden would say later, he just needed to “shut this down.”
The scene also reminded me, almost immediately, of former President Barack Obama’s run-in with another midwestern jackass named Joe the Plumber, whose name was not Joe (it was Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) and who was not a plumber (he was a contractor).
Obama met up with Joe while on the campaign trail as a candidate in 008, and spent a good five minutes humoring the guy as he just made stuff up about how an Obama tax proposal would hurt his imaginary business.
For his trouble, Obama managed to create a right-wing superstar, and was attacked every time he or his campaign tried to refute the dumb stuff Joe the Plumber would go around saying. I don’t think there’s an Obama supporter alive who doesn’t watch that video and headdesk themselves comatose watching Obama be so nice to the guy.
I probably would have out-Bidened Biden in that spot, and told him “Why don’t you go vote for McCain, then come crying to me when you can’t afford health care, I’ll still be here.”
But there is a conventional media wisdom that any slight of any voter ever is necessarily a bad and damaging thing for a candidate, best exemplified by the media freakout when Hillary Clinton called racists “deplorable,” and was dead accurate in assessing their numbers.
There are some indications that that wisdom may be somewhat obsolete in a post-Trump world.