The Democratic Party has a serious problem: their front-runner for the presidential nomination is a dope. You have read about Joe Biden’s “gaffes”: he can’t remember Barack Obama’s name, he tells a story about military heroism that is wrong in every detail, he can’t remember that by 2018, when the Parkland shooting happened, he was long gone from the vice presidency, and so on. Biden can’t get through a day without a blunder that makes headlines.
But there is a difference. The classic Washington definition of a “gaffe” is when someone says what he really thinks. With Biden, headline-making blunders reveal significant cognitive difficulties. Biden has been slow for his whole life–of average intelligence at best–and his mental faculties have not improved as he has aged. At 76 years old, he is no longer competent, assuming he ever was.
This is a big problem for the Democrats. Despite everything, Biden remains on top of polls for their presidential nomination. Other candidates–Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris–have gained a certain amount of traction. But it is extraordinary that they haven’t yet been able to surpass a candidate who, to put it politely, is no longer capable of appearing and speaking in public. This attests to the weakness of the Democrats’ presidential field.
I think there is zero chance that Joe Biden will be the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee. He is obviously not up to the task, and Democratic primary voters are not in the mood to select a deeply confused, 76-year-old white man to run for president. The nominee will be someone else. But the fact that no candidate has stepped forward to seize the mantle–or even exceed Biden’s total in a poll!–shows how thin the Democrats’ bench is.
If I were a Democrat, I would be worried about the fact that my party’s best-known politician, who still tops most polls, is obviously unqualified to run a small business, let alone the executive branch of the United States of America. This is a huge problem that the Democrats have yet to solve.
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