Opinion

ORDINARY JOE

PENNSYLVANIA – In a different week – one not so wild, what with the economy and a suspended campaign and a presidential debate in peril – it may have been a bigger story, or even a story: Joe Biden, on the stump in rural Pennsylvania, chokes up and breaks down.

On Thursday, Biden was standing in a modest high-school gymnasium in Greensburg, addressing a couple hundred seniors and union guys, a handful of teenagers. His introduction by Dan Rooney, son of Steelers’ founding owner Art, sent him off on a tangent, with Biden recalling a deep kindness shown by Art to his then-young sons as they lay in the hospital, recovering from the car accident that killed Biden’s wife and 13-month-old daughter. And then Biden stopped, turning away from the crowd, pressing a white handkerchief against his welling eyes before composing himself and moving the speech along, to great applause.

It was all very dramatic and compelling, but it didn’t make the nightly news, or cable news. It warranted a few blips on some political blogs.

Given that this is the guy whose name rarely appears without the word “gaffe” nearby, who has a popular clip on YouTube in which he “Asks a Gentleman in a Wheelchair to Stand Up” (rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars!), who called his own campaign’s attack ad against McCain “terrible” – you would think that footage of Joe Biden crying on the campaign trail would fill at least a few hours of the daily news cycle.

Think of all the talking points: is Joe Biden using his past for political gain? Is this a “Broadcast News” moment, like William Hurt making himself cry on camera? Or does this help Biden relate to the “common man”? Is this any different than Hillary choking up on the trail? There were endless fake narratives to exhume and exploit, but it was very much an “if a tree falls” wash.

You know it’s a supercharged election year packed with wacky candidates when someone as unfiltered and prone to stepping in it as Joe Biden can’t get noticed. He’s not the moose-hunter in patent-leather pumps, nor the African-American phenom, nor the maverick-y war hero. He’s been reduced to the “normal” one – and in this bunch, he pretty much is – predictable only for his unpredictability.

He may make the occasional “isn’t-that-kinda-racist?” statement (calling Obama “clean”; saying “you cannot go into a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts without an Indian accent”) but he doesn’t get labeled as a racist. He may go against Obama on the campaign trail, as when he said he’s against clean-coal technology, which Obama is for, even though there’s no such thing – but no one cares, because it’s just “Joe being Joe.” And he may break down in tears at 11:30 in the morning at a high-school gym in rural PA, but that may just make the voters here happy.

“He seems down-to-earth; he’s been through a lot,” said 85-year-old Erma Constantine, who was undecided until two months ago. “He knows the common person.”

“Very moving speech,” said Andy Sinclair, who is 34 and works at a local power plant. “I liked it when he talked about Art Rooney.” Sinclair is planning to vote for Obama-Biden: “I saw what my 401K did this year.”

The two thoughts are not unrelated: as any halfway decent political strategist knows, authenticity and policy are inextricably linked in the mind of the voter.

“Authenticity is very, very important and has everything to do with the way Biden has been presented,” says George Lakoff, author of “The Political Mind” and professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. He points to the research done by Reagan’s chief strategist and pollster, Richard Wirthlin, who found that while few agreed with Reagan on the issues, they wanted reasons to vote for him anyway: “He found that they liked Reagan and trusted that they knew where he stood – that’s authenticity. So Reagan would say, ‘Here’s what I stand for’ – then the why. Obama and Biden learned from that.”

For the record, Biden made no mention of his family history at his second campaign stop, in a sunken park in particularly hardscrabble pocket of Wilkes-Barre (median household income in 2006: $31,400), just four hours later. And while he spoke of his Scranton roots and used the same closing lines as he did that morning – that well-worn anecdote in which his dad tells a young Joe, “Champ, when you get knocked down, get up. Just get up!” – he resonated with the crowd. The veterans, the retirees, the younger voters energized mainly by Obama – they spoke of him in emotional, personal terms, using the adjectives decent, authentic, real.

“I got to talk to him personally afterwards,” said Barbara Bernoksi, a 51-year-old with a worn complexion, razor-sharp black eyeliner and long red hair. “I told him that my son is a quadriplegic, and he gets no help from the government. He told me he lost a child, and gave me a hug. He’s compassionate. Very authentic.”

“He just talks,” said Elaine Sammon, a 61-year-old retiree and enthusiastic Obama-Biden supporter. “Did he really mean that FDR got on TV during the Depression?”

In case you missed it, this week, Joe Biden said that in 1929, FDR didn’t get on TV and toss around blame. Which, in fact, did not happen, because FDR was not president in 1929 and TV was not yet invented.

So: why isn’t anyone paying attention to Joe Biden?

“You don’t hear John McCain getting up there and saying, ‘Joe Biden doesn’t even know when TV was invented – he’s not qualified to be President!’ ” says David Greenburg, professor of history at Rutgers. “People recognize that they aren’t gaffes borne of real recklessness or unfamiliarity with the issues. It’s just his love of bloviating.”

“The notion of a ‘gaffe’ is not serious,” says Lakoff. “Nobody says he’s stupid; nobody says he’s incompetent. The term ‘gaffe’ immunizes him.”

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the more gaffes Biden makes, the more likeable and trustworthy he becomes. “The gaffes are part of the authenticity,” Lakoff says. “It was the same with Reagan, the same with Bush. It just has to do with people in the process of saying what they believe – not how it will be read. Then it becomes a gaffe.”

Which is why the McCain campaign, and the media in general, have left Joe Biden alone: “They don’t think they can get much mileage out of it,” says Rutgers’ Greenburg. “Unless he says something truly sexist or racist. Then they would. And who knows what he might say?”