SAUNDERS: Joe Biden’s ‘Back in my day’ monologue is one for the ages

WASHINGTON

Sunday night, President Joe Biden welcomed new Democratic members of Congress at the White House. By the time his remarks were over — he talked for just under a half-hour — there was little doubt that with two weeks to go until Jan. 20, the U.S. president is living in the long-ago past, not the present.

Remember how Team Biden argued that the the president you saw during the June debate under-performed because he had a cold?

That “cold” has lasted all the way into 2025. Behavior that would have spawned countless hours of cable news coverage when President Donald Trump held the White House somehow is a non-story with Biden in the Oval Office. Telling truth to power? That can wait until after Trump is sworn in.

Biden was trying to make an important point about Congress today. “We don’t know each other like we used to know each other,” the 82-year-old said.

True. When Biden became a senator in 1973, senators did spend more time together in Washington, which helped them work across the aisle. Alas, his remarks seemed to have been hatched in a way-back machine.

The most noticeable old-man moment came during Biden’s meandering comments about when the late Sen. “Teddy” Kennedy took him, a rookie, to the private Senate Dining Room and told him to listen and learn.

Rather than reveal what he learned, Biden talked about the dining room itself. “You go down that hall, the first cross-corridor by the elevators.”

He also mentioned, “The staircase going up to the floor, as well as an elevator, and then there’s an office door on the left and one on the right.”

He talked about the doors leading into the room, the shape of the room (“T-shaped”) and the placement of tables.

There was a buffet to the left with “luncheon material” and a long table on the right that fit 18 to 20.

About this time, you could hear coughing in the room.

Biden talked about the eulogy he was asked to give for Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist who represented South Carolina in the Senate from 1956 to 2003. In his later years, Biden offered, Thurmond “had more African-Americans in his staff than any United States senator had, more.”

And: Thurmond “had an illegitimate child with a Black woman, never denied it. Never stopped paying for his upbringing.”

Biden has a history of talking up his relationship with Thurmond. “He claimed in August 2023 that he had ‘literally’ convinced Thurmond to vote for the Voting Rights Act before his death in 2003, when he was just 21 years old,” Fox News has reported.

The president rattled off the names of others with whom he served — most notably former Sens. Jim Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Like Thurmond, segregationists all.

Biden mentioned others with whom he served — former Sens. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Tom Eagleton of Missouri.

With the exception of Kennedy, who died in 2009, the senators on this Biden list served decades ago, and left the august body as far back as 1977.

I felt like a kid listening to my Irish grandmother talking about second cousins I had never met.

Where, I had to ask, were the big-league advisers who propped him up during his run for the White House?

Earlier in the day, after an event in the East Wing of the White House, Biden snapped at reporters. He told them he may be the oldest president, “but I know more world leaders than any one of you have ever met in your whole goddamn life.”

And: “Get off my lawn.” (Just kidding. Biden did not say that.)

From what I’ve seen, cable news outlets and other Big Media have given more time to Biden’s recent Medal of Freedom awards than Biden’s peevish remarks to the press. Could it be a double standard? Or maybe they don’t think Biden talking up his work with segregationists or scolding the media is a story. Because it’s old news.

This column has been updated to correct a quote from President Biden.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.