May 17, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
They just want to hear the old man stutter
The real reason House Republicans want that audio recording.
The House Republicans already have the transcripts of the Justice Department interviews with the president. Those interviews were part of an investigation into government secrets that were found at Joe Biden’s home and office. The department cleared Biden of wrongdoing, but not before Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report smeared him as “elderly man with a poor memory.” Now the Republicans want the audio recordings, too.
The White House blocked that effort today. In “a scathing letter,” according to the AP, White House attorney Ed Siskel said “the absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.” (As I was writing this piece, the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold US Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of the Congress for his role in blocking the release of the audio recordings.)
That’s true. But let’s not substitute one set of reasons for another, especially when the other set of reasons comes straight from a Republican on the House Oversight Committee. Last month, a Fox host asked California Congressman Darrell Issa to explain why they needed audio recordings of the interviews when they already have transcripts.
They want to hear Biden’s stutter.
They want to hear the old man stutter.
I don’t know why the president doesn’t just say this. Perhaps he’s concerned that it might bring unwanted attention. It’s not like he hides it. He talks about his age as well as his stutter. But it’s probably better for him to be in charge of that story rather than for his enemies to be in charge of it. Whatever the case, chopping up, distorting and using Biden’s stutter for “partisan political purposes” is the missing element in reporting on the conflict between him and the House Republicans.
Right now, the dominant narrative seems to be about a president who is, according to the AP, “particularly sensitive to questions about his age.” His latest move to block access to the audio recordings of his interviews with Robert Hur is being cast as if the White House were trying to keep something about Biden’s age hidden from public view.
According to House Speaker Mike Johnson, per the AP, Biden is “suppressing the tape because he’s afraid to have voters hear it.” He said they “will not be able to hear why prosecutors felt the president of the United States was, in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s own words, an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ and thus shouldn’t be charged.”
That might sound OK, but Darrell Issa blew it. “One of the questions is not what did he say but how did he say it,” he told a Fox host last month when asked to explain why the House Oversight Committee needed the audio. “Was he stumbling more? A transcript doesn’t give you the pauses. It doesn’t give you nonverbal stuttering” (my italics).
Darrell Issa: “One of the questions is not what did he say but how did he say it,” he told a Fox host last month when asked to explain why the House Oversight Committee needed the audio. “Was he stumbling more? A transcript doesn’t give you the pauses. It doesn’t give you nonverbal stuttering” (my italics).
So Johnson and the House Republicans are walking a fine line.
On one side of it is a place where good-faith questions about the president’s age and mental fitness are legitimate. On the other side of that line, however, is a place where such questions can’t possibly be asked in good faith. Indeed, they are so illegitimate as to be ageist.
And sadistic.
Johnson says they want to hear the audio recordings to understand “why prosecutors felt the president of the United States was … an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ and thus shouldn’t be charged.”
Yeah, no. They already have the transcripts. They just want to hear the old man stutter. They just want to feed the old man’s stutter to the rightwing media apparatus. It will chop and distort it ad nauseam.
It didn’t occur to me till halfway through writing this piece that Mike Johnson and the House Republicans should consider more caution. White voters over 65 are the GOP’s largest reliable voting bloc. While I’m sure some of them firmly believe that a man as old as Biden has no business being president because he’s old, I’d guess a good number of elderly GOP voters don’t care for their party’s attacks on his age.
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This isn’t just a hunch. A Times poll (yes, I know) from April suggested that the president leads Trump with over-65 voters 51 to 42 percent! Another Times poll (yes, I know) suggested that Biden has “maintained most of his support among older and white voters, who are much less likely to demand fundamental changes to the system and far likelier to say that democracy is the most important issue for their vote.”
Bloomberg reported recently that the president is expanding outreach to senior citizens. “It’s a bid to capitalize on polls showing Biden leading Donald Trump among those 65 and older, reversing a trend that’s seen seniors back Republican nominees in recent elections.”
If the story is “what’s he hiding?” the Republicans will probably be all right. But if it becomes explicitly ageist, or becomes explicitly ableist (a prejudice against disabilities, such a stutter), then things could go south with uncertain consequences. Much would depend, of course, on whether the president wants to tell another version of his story.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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