| The Uncle Joe persona, which has been a wellspring of Biden memes for the past decade, has been embraced to some degree by Biden himself. When the Obama White House made its final contribution to the 2016 White House Correspondents' dinner with a satirical video, Biden sat at a table polishing a half dozen Ray Bans aviators. Joe Biden, the politican, announced this week that he is once again running for president. And one of his biggest obstacles might be related to a different Biden meme: Creepy Uncle Joe. For years, the right-wing Internet has used photographs of Biden placing his hands on women, or standing too close to them at public events, to render the former vice president as a creep, a meme that was eventually referenced in a tweet by the president. A part of that meme crossed over into reality recently, as multiple women came forward to say that Biden touched and kissed them without consent during political events in ways that they found inappropriate (as that controversy unfolded, a woman in a heavily memed photo wrote that the exchange between them wasn't "creepy" at all, asking people to stop sharing her photograph as proof of a dynamic that didn't exist at that moment). That, along with his struggle to address his role in the treatment of Anita Hill during that 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have helped to fade the Onion's version of Biden into almost nothingness. I'm not a political journalist or analyst, which means I'm vastly unqualified to dive into whether either meme could help or hurt Biden's chances of getting the nomination. But looking back on the history of "Uncle Joe," it's clear that the affable, bumbling persona conveyed in that meme had an effect of replacing, in the imaginations of some young voters, the real Joe Biden — who was, after all, a politician. |
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