JOE BIDEN FORGOT HIMSELF
When you are near or beyond your eighth decade, age makes a difference. It makes a difference in terms of things such as memorizing a script with lots of data and then regurgitating it. But that doesn’t mean one’s cognitive functioning in reasoning, recalling one’s own experience and feeling a way to do right is lost.
Yet, Heads of State, CEOs and others preparing for their moments in the spotlight often take the advice of lawyers. Now there is nothing wrong with lawyers, save when the upcoming occasion is not in a courtroom.
A recent example, before the first 2024 presidential debate, was the Ivy League college presidents who when questioned by a congressional committee about their responses to on campus protests in response to the Israel-Hamas war answered questions with a common refrain, “It depends on the context.” The irony was in responding that way they displayed they did not understand context. Their mistake was these college presidents sought advice for preparation from high-powered attorneys. Big mistake. Why? Because these Ivy Leaguers were playing to a general viewing audience, not a jury who have different responsibilities and constraints than a general public.
Another example of rehearsing scripts in high-tension occasions is advertising agencies — whose expertise is supposed to be creativity and thinking on their feet — rehearse scripts word-for-word in preparing their pitch to garner a new client. The mistake President Biden made in preparing for a debate with Trump was accepting the idea that he, Joe, needed to memorize scripts that were written for him to memorize in response to topics such as immigration, inflation and geopolitics. And, especially at the beginning of the debate when stress is highest, he stumbled.
Biden should have taken advice from himself and from leading actors, novelists, dancers and other performers. Great actors, for example, know the script is a map, not the territory. And a great director allows for and expect this pliability.
Guidance comes from Mikhail Baryshnikov in talking about a performer needing to be a kind of “soloist.” He says, “When the soloist comes center-stage he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life…each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who at that point, he cannot help be. The soloist has a point of view towards life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. He knows who he is and he shows this to you, willing. The actress, Kristen Stewart concurs. Talking about acting, Stewart says. “There are moments written in the script and moments that just happen. Then, at that moment of surprise and you realize “I just got to it.”
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Norman Mailer, who I had the great fortune to have a long conversation with, taught me a fundamental lesson: if you just present bare facts you are simply putting forth a referendum and the story ends there. Facts need to be refined according to the impulses of one’s true nature, and in this transformation people can synthesize by way of their own transformation what the reality might have been. Then the facts truly “breathe.”
Let the movie director James Cameron have the last word. He brought attention to the idea that “making a film is a journey from your head to your heart.” The same is true when going for the Oval Office. What Joe Biden was guilty of was he forget this human fact. Too bad because his heart seems good, not like the grifter and con artist who opposes him.
