President Joe Biden spoke in Buffalo on Tuesday after visiting the families of victims of a racist mass shooting in a supermarket there on Saturday. It was a speech that’s likely to get lost in the current-events shuffle, but it shouldn’t. It was a good one, well written and well delivered, and hitting on the necessary themes of combating hatred and defending democracy. And beyond the important topic, it also demonstrated a lot about representation and presidenting.
What was striking about the speech was how Bidenesque it was, combining all of his leading traits as a public figure. Biden displayed the empathy that was a central part of his campaign — how losing loved ones is something he understands from repeated personal experience. It’s worth noting, by the way, that Biden is hardly unique among presidents in having lost family members; that it has become so much a part of his political persona is in part about the tragedies he’s endured, but it’s also a choice he’s made to base much of his representational style on empathy.
Biden also deployed, as usual, his Scranton-ness — specifically comparing Buffalo to the working-class hometown of his Pennsylvania youth. Biden evokes Scranton, his parents and his roots not to contrast them to other places or backgrounds, but as an inclusive form of “one of us” representation. Biden doesn’t treat Scranton or comparable places as “real” America in opposition to alien-seeming cities and regions, or his Roman Catholic religion or Irish ethnic roots as more American than others. Instead, he treats himself and Scranton as typical of all Americans, from all sorts of superficially different but ultimately similar places. The point isn’t whether that’s good or bad; it’s just how Biden casts himself and his nation, which leads him to talk about murder victims and the families who survive them as us, not them.
