The big game, the new rules, and she whose name need not be mentioned

Joe Biden walks and talks like an old man, but every now and then, he thinks like a young one.

The president drew scathing criticism from Democratic strategists last week for declining for a second year to sit for a three or four-minute appearance, cut from a 15 or 20-minute interview, to be broadcast before the Super Bowl.

By the old rules, they were right. At a time when the polls are awful for him, and people are saying he’s not up for the job, Biden doesn’t need to look like he’s shying away from a chance, even a loaded one, to sell himself.

The new rules are best illustrated by what the Biden campaign did instead. After the Kansas City Chiefs won an overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers, it posted a picture of “Dark Brandon” (Biden’s face with weird, sci-fi eyes) with the words “Just like we drew it up.”

There are overlapping in-jokes here, and 90 percent-plus of Americans won’t get many of them. That, coincidentally, is about the same percentage of Americans who would have been mildly irritated had a president rather than a quarterback appeared on their TV screens before Sunday’s game. This episode has nothing to do with how the presidential election is going to turn out, but it says a lot about how the campaign is going to be waged.

The “Dark Brandon” message is a reference to a conspiracy theory that went around in some far-right circles, claiming the game was being rigged in the Chief’s favor so that their star tight end Travis Kelce’s romance with a pop singer aligned with the Democrats would get more attention.

Instead of denying that accusation, the campaign chose a moment when they’d be noticed to ridicule it.

The new rules give politicians a much broader license to make fun of their opponents. The new rules favor niche messaging and social media over the ponderous conventions of mainstream media. The new rules are less about avoiding offending a few people in the middle and more about connecting with the activists on your side.

Donald Trump has played by the new rules since he got into politics. The Super Bowl episode is a sign Biden is now, as well. His campaign also used the game to debut a TikTok site with a short video.

Kelce’s lady friend understands the new rules of her profession very well. She’s vaulted over the old recording industry by re-recording her early albums and answered her critics by writing songs about them. The mere mention of her name excites some and irritates others, so I’ll avoid it here, but you know who I’m talking about.

With her capitalist work ethic and folksy delivery, she might, with a few slight twists in attitude and reality, have become the Republican governor of a flyover state. Instead, for reasons that seem to have more to do with Trump’s envy of her popularity than practical politics, she has become a MAGA target. Considering her huge base of young women fans, that seems risky, but Trump understands the new rules in his own way.

This has been one of the country’s most talked-about political stories at a time when Congress has been fumbling around with some of the most important issues of this decade: immigration and military aid to Ukraine and Israel. That says something unsettling about the nation’s collective attention span.