As the old ditty has it, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” It’s a lyric of universal mirth and appeal—except, so it seems, when it comes to Joe Biden, whose leisurely drop-in at a midtown Manhattan ice cream parlor Monday prompted gasps of puzzlement, disgust, and horror from pundits seeking any excuse to deem the president unworthy of his job.
Clay Travis, a right-wing radio host, found the outing “super weird,” asking his 1.1 million X followers, “Do you know grown men who go get ice cream by themselves? I don’t. It’s very strange.”
Fox’s Jeanine Pirro fumed, “As the world is burning, Joe Biden is licking his ice cream.” The same network’s Jesse Watters saw the incident as a sign of Biden’s “diminished faculties,” quoting the Alzheimer’s Association as hailing ice cream’s “power to immediately elicit soothing feelings” and “stimulate brain receptors.”
All of which makes me wonder: Have any of these people ever tastedice cream? More to the point, have they ever tasted Van Leeuwenice cream, which Biden was enjoying at its Rockefeller Center outpost alongside NBC’s Late Nighthost Seth Meyers? (Contrary to Travis, the president didn’t go in by himself.) He was about to make an appearance on Meyers’ show. The studio is a one-minute walk from the Van Leeuwen parlor. How could any devotee of a good cone resist?
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So, Biden, who was in New York for a political fundraiser, walks into the parlor, orders an ice cream cone, and stands there smiling and joking with Meyers when the press gaggle starts asking him questions. One of them is: “Can you give us a sense of when you think that [Middle East] cease-fire will start, sir?”
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Biden replies, “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close. We’re close. It’s not done yet. And my hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a cease-fire.”
This casual newsmaking is what miffed some commentators. Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli-American journalist, tweeted, “This appears both irresponsible, and with the ice cream cone, tone deaf and tactless.” Gregg Carlstrom, the Economist’s Middle East correspondent, agreed: “Nothing says ‘we’re taking this seriously’ like talking about a war that has killed ~30,000 people with an ice-cream cone halfway to your mouth.”
Really? It’s not as if Biden sauntered to a lectern emblazoned with the presidential seal and recited a formal announcement while holding an ice cream cone. He happened to be eating an ice cream cone. Reporters shouted out questions, as is their wont. One of them asked about the Paris peace talks. If Biden had ignored the question, these same pundits would have said that he’d gone deaf or that the ice cream had given him brain freeze. Instead, he answered the question. Is this really the first time a president has made a little news while enjoying himself?
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Read MoreAnd what about the notion that eating an ice cream cone in public is somehow unpresidential? This is an easy one to research. The internet is rife with images—lotsof them—of presidents licking ice cream cones in public. As noted earlier, Biden is a longtime devotee. So was Barack Obama when he was in office. George W. Bush was caught on camera, many times, digging into a cone. And so was Donald Trump. There are lots of photos of Trump eating an ice cream cone in public. One snapshot shows him holding twoice cream cones—in public and broad daylight. Yet no one at Fox or elsewhere took this as a sign of insensitivity or dementia.
It is well known that Biden has a penchant for Corvette sports cars, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Amtrak train rides, and now, yes, ice cream cones. These are all-American tastes. It’s this election season that’s getting very weird.
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许晋豪
芮恩
张敬轩
