Joe Biden's New Slogan Causes a Fuss

'No malarkey' isn't exactly hailed as being in touch
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 3, 2019 2:27 PM CST

On Sunday Joe Biden tweeted that "We're officially on the road for our eight-day #NoMalarkey Tour across Iowa!" And yes, "No Malarkey!" is emblazoned on his tour bus. It's a campaign slogan that's attracting no shortage of derision. At Vox, Matthew Yglesias calls it "incredibly bad ... in many ways," among them the fact that it doesn't impart much of any information about the candidate other than one of his "main weaknesses—he is very old." (Yglesias isn't wholly negative though, allowing that the slogan is memorable and authentic.) The Guardian reports that on Monday Jimmy Kimmel weighed in, too, first quipping that "the no malarkey tour is coming to a senior center near you!" before his team asked young people who were walking by his LA studio what the definition of "malarkey" is.

Answers ranged from "I'm guessing it has something to do with art ... painting maybe" to "something weird" to "different kingdoms or something." Trevor Noah provided a definition of his own on the Daily Show: "It sounds like the dish your vegan cousin serves at Thanksgiving—'It's not turkey, it’s malarkey!'" But at the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg sees something potentially valuable in the slogan and the old-time feeling it generates. "Nostalgia is Biden’s trump card," he writes. "For moderate voters who nonetheless think things have gone haywire under Trump, Biden represents a kind of return to normalcy, to a time when partisan politics weren't quite as lethal. He may be as prone to malapropisms and misstatements as Trump, but his folksy fumbling is a known quantity, a relic from a more predictable time." (More Joe Biden 2020 stories.)

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