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The late Martin Anderson, one of Ronald Reagan’s long-time senior policy advisers going all the way back to the 1976 campaign, once told me a story to illustrate Reagan’s unappreciated cleverness.  When Anderson published his favorable chronicle of the Reagan years called Revolution: The Reagan Legacy in early 1988 (while Reagan was still in office), he called the president to ask the favor of a dust jacket blurb. Reagan kindly explained that much as he would like to, the White House counsel and other advisers told him sitting presidents can’t (or shouldn’t) make commercial endorsements of any kind.

Anderson was disappointed, but understood. Then, a few months later shortly after the book his the bookstore shelves, Anderson was watching TV news coverage of Reagan getting off the helicopter on the White House lawn and approaching a bank of microphones for some brief but rare comments to the media about something, and lo and behold! Reagan was clutching a copy of Anderson’s book under his arm, with the title plainly visible for the cameras and easy to make out. Anderson took this as a much better boost for the book than a dust jacket blurb. And Anderson knew it was no coincidence or happenstance.

This story came back to me over the weekend with the photos of Joe Biden emerging from a Nantucket bookstore holding in plain sight the book he purchased: Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017.  Khalidi is a former spokesperson for the PLO, defender of Hamas terrorism, and a vicious anti-Semite, full stop. He is also an emeritus professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, naturally.

It is quite possible that in his senile state Biden isn’t actually replicating Reagan’s deliberate act of promoting a book with an implicit presidential endorsement. But you’d think that aides, or his super-smart son Hunter, who was with him, would have made him keep it in a bag. Deliberate or not, it is revealing.

It is also notable that this gesture occurs shortly after Khalidi took emeritus status at Columbia. I have a hunch that the few adults at Columbia know that a large part of their anti-Semitism problem stems from faculty like Khalidi, and maybe pushed him out the door quietly. I’d like to think so.

Reminder: The Los Angeles Times still won’t release the audio recording they have of the Khalidi speech given in Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago where Barack Obama was in attendance and apparently approving. Rumors are that Khalidi’s speech was openly and viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. No wonder the Times has covered it up; it might have hurt the Lightworker in his 2008 campaign.

January 20 can’t come soon enough.