Last Joe Biden Post, I Swear

I read Original Sin so you don't have to

It took 11 months and a Washington publicity blitz for former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to admit, “Maybe, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree [the Democrats would have been better off if Joe Biden didn’t run for reelection.” Veteran campaign strategist James Carville was quick to hit back, “Well, f—, say something when it meant something,” he said on his podcast, Politics War Room. In the obliquely named, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, And His Disastrous Choice To Run Again, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson posit that Biden’s original sin was to seek reelection, but Democrats like Buttigieg demonstrate the sin is twofold. The former presidential hopeful, whose campaign hopes likely died when Flight 5342 nosedived into the Potomac, is a member of the political class that ignored the feelings of voters and their own perceptions to protect an antiquated Democratic political machine.

Because Carville’s right; recognizing Joe Biden was a liability in 2024 didn’t require hindsight. It only required regular sight.

When I was in high school, I followed politics the way some people follow football. It wasn’t the nuts and bolts of policy that drew me in, but the novelist’s hunger for human psychodrama. I loved election season, especially using the assembled field of candidates to game out my own theories on messaging. By the fall of 2019, I could rattle off the names of the minor and major players—Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders, Harris, and, yes, Biden—and wrote one of my college supplements on the crowded field. Students at my high school had a unique political fluency. The debate was between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, with a predictable gender split. No one liked Biden for the nomination. He had none of the personal or ideological charisma of the other candidates, and he was so old. Two girls who were outspoken Biden supporters, and the student reaction was of the decibel of derision only available to teenagers, why? One of those girls ended up serving in his White House.

I didn’t love any of the candidates, though, if the primary hadn’t been decided by the time voting reached Pennsylvania, I probably would have voted for Warren. Certainly, I wouldn’t have voted for Biden.

Olivia Nuzzi opens a profile of Biden’s campaign, “Joe Biden’s Zombie Campaign,” by writing, “Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old.” The piece was written in September of 2019. I remember reading it and trying to extricate myself from a slow-moving and inexorable dread. This was 2019—two years after #MeToo and one year after the nationwide student protest against violence— and us high school students were the heirs to a future of unlimited possibility where possibility can allow for environmental apocalypse and vast social and technological advancement. The candidate to meet this change couldn’t be Joe Biden. And yet. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said in 2020, “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

I remember when he said this. I thought he might mean it.

The revelations in Original Sin will surprise no one who paid close attention to Biden coverage, but laid out in a timeline verified by over 200 sources, the reporting presents an incontrovertible portrait of cognitive decline. As early as 2015, Joe Biden was showing signs of clinical decline, and according to staffers, many of his videos from the 2020 campaign were heavily edited. Many staffers believe he was never the same after his son Beau died, that “part of Biden’s brain and mental capacity seemed to dissolve like someone poured hot water on [them].” If Joe Biden’s ego not only damned the man but also the country, the facts of his history also cry out for sympathy. Certainly, the man has weathered more than his fair share of tragedy: the deaths of his first wife and infant daughter, his son’s death, two children who battled addiction, and, now, his own cancer diagnosis. Of course, I have sympathy for Joe Biden; he will likely die of the same cancer that my grandfather recently died of. Sympathy, however, does not suspend judgement.

This is a man who had no business running for reelection and possibly no business running in 2020. In the weeks following the debate, top Democrats urged the President to hit the campaign trail and prove he wasn’t too old for the job. When he failed deliver anything longer than a 15-minute interview, when he failed to hold Town Halls, when he failed to call and reassure anxious senators, when he failed to keep Putin and Zelensky straight in a critical press conference, when he failed to speak to donors without a teleprompter Democrats were forced to conclude it was because he couldn’t.

Though Naomi Biden, the President’s granddaughter, referred to the book as “political fairy smut,” the actions of Biden’s aides speak for themselves. As previously reported, aides kept his schedule between 10 am-4 pm when he was “dependably engaged.” He sometimes had trouble recognizing longtime political allies and his decades-long friend, George Clooney. Less reported on are the cue cards that aides gave him. They began as reminders of the day’s news, but by 2023 had morphed into prepared answers for reporters’ questions. For example, if he was asked about Hunter Biden, he should reply, “I love my son.” Aides spent hours editing videos to hide the slowness of Biden’s gait and the incoherence of his speech. They condemned clips of his stumbles as “cheap fakes,” a term not dissimilar from “fake news.” As the 2024 campaign grew closer, the President rarely talked without a teleprompter, even in informal meetings.

The Biden camp relied on the defense that while the president could no longer communicate as he once had, his decision-making remained unaffected. Even if the reader is inclined to take their claim at face value, it relies on the central fallacy that communicating is tertiary to the presidency when any politico knows the power of the executive rests in his ability to persuade. Perhaps if Biden were able to reliably string more than a few sentences together, he could have sold his economic measures to the American people, like Obama did in 2012, when he assured them that things were slowly improving and another term of his administration would do more to help the middle class than Mitt Romney. Though they stop short of saying it outright, Tapper and Thompson make the argument that Biden’s cognitive decline was responsible for many of the administration’s missteps, no more convincingly than on the border.

Biden’s administration began the term, poised to implement an aggressive border control strategy that never materialized. Regardless of the timeline of Biden’s decline, the blame for the aborted border, one of the main issues that cost Democrats the election, lies with Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff. Klain courted the progressive wing during the campaign and, once in office, continued to serve as a key advocate for progressive causes. According to anonymous aides, Biden remarked, “Only one person here is smarter than me and it's Ron.” Under Klain’s directive, Biden became an unlikely ally to progressives. “[Joe Biden] was not my first or second choice for president, but I am a convert,” Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in the fall of 2022. “I never thought I would say this, but I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out.”

The agenda we laid out.

Around this time, the communications team began to openly float the idea that voters not only voted for the President but the advisors around him, a line of argument that would have been unthinkable under any other administration. It was the progressives who remained Biden’s last defenders in the drag-out end to his campaign.

Since the book’s release, Tapper has become a rare figure of bipartisan derision for persons as diverse as Megyn Kelly and Jon Stewart. Many of his liberal critics resort to the worst kind of cynicism. How, they ask, can we discuss Joe Biden’s failings during the presidency of Donald Trump? That the President every day flouts the law and draws the country closer and closer to autocracy does not exonerate Joe Biden. Since 2016, our presidential elections have been perceived by many voters as a choice between the “lesser of two evils.” That this rhetorical device presents a gross false equivalency notwithstanding, in using the example of Trump to lay off Biden, the liberal punditry inadvertently argues for a politics of lesser evils.

Biden won his 2020 campaign on promised return to normalcy that had as much to do with COVID-19 as a return to Democratic norms. Ignoring the advice of his 2024 pollsters, he continued to declare “Democracy is on the ballot,” until his name was off the ballot. Original Sin, however, makes clear that Biden embraced and rejected these ideals at his convenience. With Biden cast as old King Lear and Jill thrust into the part of Lady Macbeth, the previously maligned Robert Hur emerges as an unexpected hero. Robert Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents several months after Biden condemned Trump’s mishandling of classified documents as “totally irresponsible.” Hur ultimately concluded that both acts were irresponsible. However, he recommended against prosecution because he believed the jury would perceive the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He based this conclusion on a five-hour interview in which the President struggled to stay on topic and mixed up several important dates, including when he was Vice President and which year his son died. Afterwards, the President said he was outraged at the report’s mention of Beau. “How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden said, “Frankly when I was asked that question, I thought to myself, It wasn’t any of their damn business.” This was false; Biden brought up his son unprompted.

Top Democrats wasted no time in discrediting Hur. “It was just a smear and cheap shots and just taking things out of context, or even just inventing," Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman said, “clearly there was an agenda there.” Kamala Harris used her authority as a former prosecutor to call Hur’s assessment of Biden “gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate.”

The backlash to the Hur report blew onto Merrick Garland, whom the Biden family already resented for investigating Hunter Biden. Several anonymous Biden sources told Politico that many of the President's advisors believed Garland “should have demanded edits to Hurr’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.” Additionally, they “do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a second possible term.” Biden tried to frame himself in the grand tradition of LBJ and FDR, but when the hammer of justice came for him and his scandal-plagued son, Hunter, Biden revealed himself to be just as susceptible to the corruptions of power as the many Presidents who put their family over the office.

When Biden reversed his long-standing promise to pardon his son, he wrote, “I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted... raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.” As a father, the decision is probably the only one he could make. As a President, his rhetoric about a politically motivated Justice Department echoes Trump’s position towards Jim Comey and Robert Mueller. Biden’s pardon weakened the department at a time when it needed to preserve its independence. It should come as no surprise that when, on his first day in office, Trump pardoned the January 6^th rioters, many Republicans justified the pardon by pointing the finger at Biden’s pardon. After all, politics was only the lesser of two evils.

How could so many journalists fail to report on a scandal so clearly before their eyes? Conservative pundits see the media’s complacency as evidence of a grand liberal conspiracy, but the media’s complacency is ultimately more quotidian. The Biden comms team was ruthless in discrediting reports of the president’s aging. Reporters were punished with social media campaigns and the withdrawal of access that was necessary for the White House beat. Many of them were afraid of the risk to their career if they reported on what they saw. Many wanted to believe the White House when they said Biden was fine, forgetting the long history of Presidents who misled the public to stay in power. While many reporters fell down on the job, the fault of the scandal lies with Biden, his White House, and a Democratic political establishment that couldn’t think beyond Trump.

Biden remained in the race for so long because he believed he was the only person able to defeat Trump. This rationale dominated the Democratic party in 2019, which, scarred by the defeat of their woman candidate, made a false idol out of electability. The punditry insisted Joe Biden was electable because he was a centrist, because he came from Scranton, and because he was a white man. However, determining electability before an election is an inherently false metric. Who would have thought the first black president was electable after Bush or a racist reality TV star after him?

By 2022, a New York Times poll found 64 percent of Democratic voters wanted a different presidential candidate, with Biden’s age cited as a chief reason for their concern. If Trump’s election is the natural result of a party’s deafness to its voters, it is the consequence of a failure in imagination. Democrats became so focused on defeating Trump they forgot it was their job to elect a president who succeeded on his own merits instead of an improvement on the other guy.

Americans deserve more than the contest of two egos. I hope Democrats take the next election to listen to us.