With the first presidential debate behind us, it’s all the more clear that a big change is coming. It seems like forever ago that the GOP field was packed full of contenders and everyone was feeling the Bern, now we’re down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and the clock is ticking down for Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House.
It what can be considered an exit interview of sorts, Vice President Joe Biden visited The Tonight Show and Jimmy Fallon and immediately breaks the ice by referencing Fallon’s (disastrous?) interview with Donald Trump, asking the host to, “go easy on him.” Fallon does his part, laughs boisterously at times, then simply gets out of the way. Rather than discussing how America is going down the tubes, Biden goes for the deep cut and references a Seamus Heaney poem.
“There’s a stanza in his poem that I think describes where we are now if we’re smart. He said, ‘history teaches us not to hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime. the longed-for tidal wave of justice rises up, and hope and history rhyme.’ I really think that we’re at that place in American history if we just have the nerve to seize the moment. The American people, they never bend, they never break. They’re generous. I wish that we’d stop talking about what trouble we’re in. We’re in a better position than any country in the world in the 21st century. We really are.”
Which naturally segues into talk about the debate, which elicits a laugh from Jimmy and a sign of the cross from Vice President Biden. He summed it up with, “I’ve never quite seen anything like that.” That’s a pretty apt response. He continued on when Fallon brought up the debate’s fact checking with, “I’ve never seen anybody who knew as few facts.” The band played, Jimmy laughed, and Biden had to explain that what he said wasn’t a joke.
It’s then when Biden truly opens up and begins railing against Trump.
“When he talks about, ‘well you know, I was rooting for the housing market to fail because that’s business.’ That’s not business, that’s callous. Or that ‘I paid no taxes and that makes me smart.’ What are the rest of us, suckers? Can you think of any president you’ve studied, read about or knew who would say anything like that? It angers me, quite frankly.”
This couldn’t be more different than Trump’s appearance with Mr. Fallon. In other words, Biden comes off as someone who we could really use in the government for the foreseeable future.
(Via The Tonight Show)
