Steve Hayward has observed the sudden blast of stories regarding President Biden’s age-related decline. Most recently, Robert Reich has piled on in the Guardian. The theme of the stories is that Biden will be too old to run for office again in 2024 and ought to make his intentions clear after the midterm elections.
If Biden is seen to be too old now to run for office in two years, he must have been too old in 2020. Thus the nineteenth-century style basement campaign his team ran for him and all the rest of the charade. Everyone around him knew he was out of it.
In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger places the blame for Biden’s failing presidency on the Democratic Party. He offers this assessment:
For this mess, I blame the Democrats, not—as many of them have put it—Mr. Biden’s alleged unwillingness to “fight.”
To be blunt: The reason most Americans don’t want Mr. Biden to run is that it’s clear by now that he has cognitive problems unacceptable in a person responsible for conducting the presidential office.
Since Inauguration Day, every public statement he has made to the American people, large or small, has been written by someone else for him to read by rote from a teleprompter. His off-the-cuff followups are painful.
Mr. Biden’s condition didn’t begin on Inauguration Day. Those around him knew there was a problem, but the needs of the party prevailed. Concerned that a progressive such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren couldn’t win the general election, the Democrats fashioned a faux moderate candidacy out of Mr. Biden.
We commented on Biden’s mental infirmity many times during the course of the campaign. Some news rating service even sent us a questionnaire to evaluate our reliability as a news source that asked for a citation to support our judgment. We were apparently to be docked for relying on the evidence of our senses.
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