President Biden sent out a bafflingly dumb tweet demonstrating his (or more likely his social media team’s) complete lack of comprehension of what the phrase “point of view” means.
Biden tweeted a photo of himself and Vice President Kamala Harris with the caption “POV: You believe health care should be a right, not a privilege, in America.”
POV: You believe health care should be a right, not a privilege, in America. pic.twitter.com/kHfxWTnsOE
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 27, 2024
The proper use of POV should be obvious: if you write a caption expressing your own POV, you can’t be in the picture unless you’re looking in a mirror. Life isn’t a third-person video game.
Now, obviously Biden and Harris are trying to tell the president’s followers that the two of them think healthcare is a right. But if they wanted to communicate that, they should’ve written something like, “POV: you’re about to meet a president and VP who believe healthcare should be a right.”
As it’s written, their use of the term “POV” suggests that the picture of the president and VP is what someone who believes healthcare is a right would be seeing. Which makes no damn sense. Lots of people see Biden and Harris in the course of a day, and I’m sure many of them hold very different positions on healthcare.
Are the president and VP implying that everybody who believes in free healthcare spends every waking moment staring at Biden-Harris images? Because if so, that’s terrifying.
Look, I want people to have healthcare. I’ve often lamented the fact that other developed countries are able to provide some semblance of universal coverage while the U.S. has been largely unable to do so (don’t get me started on the disaster ObamaCare has been.)
But if the cost of free healthcare is a dystopian loop of Biden-Harris footage being beamed “Clockwork Orange” style into my retinas at all hours of the day, count me out. I’ll start Googling homeopathy or something. (RELATED: What The Hell Happened To Joe Biden’s Chin In This Video?)
All jokes aside, it’s not that hard to come up with a clever social media caption that isn’t a blatant misuse of a popular phrase.
The POV of someone who believes in universal healthcare would more aptly be a photo of Bernie Sanders (who, unlike Biden, actually supports single payer) from the far-away perspective of a crowd member at a rally. Or maybe a closet full of nothing but bags of weed and Che Guevara shirts.