This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.” —President Joe Biden in his interview with special counsel Robert K. Hur.
President Joe Biden’s occasional memory lapses have been causing him problems in his reelection campaign. His critics believe he lacks the mental dexterity to run the country, and it’s a concern now shared by much of the public.
His recent so-called gaffes, such as moments where he confused foreign leaders with their dead predecessors, have only underlined these worries. But the most explosive apparent evidence of the issue came in February, when special counsel Robert K. Hur issued his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, concluding in it that in interviews the president came off as “an elderly man with poor memory.”
Biden contested the characterization at the time, saying in a press conference, “I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president and I’ve put this country back on its feet.”
“My memory is fine,” he added. “None of you thought I could pass any of the things that I got passed. How’d that happen? I guess I just forgot what was going on.”
The transcript of the president’s lengthy October conversation with Hur was released Tuesday. As pundits and reporters dissect the document for evidence (or lack thereof) of Hur’s “poor memory” claims, Slate noticed Biden’s rhetorical flair—at times poignant, other times a little cringe.
Take, for example, his adoration for his wife. Throughout the interview, Biden spoke fondly about his marriage of nearly 47 years to Dr. Jill Biden.
At one point, when asked if he brought classified material from the West Wing or Naval Observatory to his lake house in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden quipped about what someone in the home might stumble across:
“I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.”
Oh, the thrills of enduring romance!
A recently released book on the nation’s first ladies surfaced that in 2004, then–Sen. Biden explained that he didn’t run for president that year because “I’d rather be at home making love to my wife while my children are asleep,” according to the Guardian. Maybe we the American people, not to mention the Bidens’ kids, don’t need to be privy to more about the Bidens’ intimate life.
But Biden seems in the interview to not necessarily need a better memory so much as a capacity for restraint. Despite the line of inquiry for the interview being expressly—you’ll recall—the unsexy business of the flow of classified information, Biden still went down a series of tangential, long-winded monologues about all sorts of things.
He told the story of a legal case he worked on in which a 23-year-old man who was working in a containment vessel had his pants catch on fire, leading him to lose his testicles. After being asked to write a motion for dismissal in the case, the apparent injustice of it all convinced Biden to become a public defender.
In vivid detail, he also spoke about a past trip to Mongolia, probably from 2011 when he was vice president, telling Hur that he hit an unexpected target during an archery trip with the country’s prime minister.
“I don’t know if it was to embarrass me or to make a point, but I get handed the bow and arrow,” he recalled. “Pure luck, I hit the goddamn target.”
While under questioning from the special counsel about whether he illegally handled the classified documents, Biden also revealed that he enjoys working in his pajamas, and that his wife previously tried to lure him out of a reelection race for Senate by offering to pay for him to go to architectural school. (He called himself a “frustrated architect.”)
The biggest takeaway from the report, upon reading it, is that the president cannot help himself from storytelling. In the transcript, he even says that this penchant has not gone unrecognized. Apparently, he’s in hot demand on the circuit for eulogy speeches.
“I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy, because you get asked to do everybody’s eulogy,” he said.
