Joe Biden Should Step Aside

National Review Online

Monday, February 12, 2024

 

Joe Biden is a crisis in the making. The last president to run for reelection who was so obviously incapable of serving another four years was FDR in 1944. But Roosevelt was in the midst of ably managing a world war and, as it turned out, chose his vice president wisely.

 

Biden’s mental and physical diminishment has been clear for some time and has been even more alarming the last several weeks. The Robert Hur report on his mishandling of classified documents underlined his reduced state. In an instantly famous sentence, Hur said his team concluded that a jury would consider Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report, of course, included damning details of Biden not being able to place the years of his vice presidency nor — and this is what precipitated Biden’s angry press conference in response — the year of his son Beau Biden’s death.

 

Rage has been directed at Hur for including this material in his report. This anger is misplaced. The report indicates that Hur could have justified recommending that Biden be indicted for serious crimes (Hur found that, for years, Biden willfully mishandled classified intelligence, yet the applicable statute requires prosecutors to establish only gross negligence, a less demanding standard). Moreover, Hur was required by regulation to produce a confidential report explaining his reasoning. Then, the attorney general decides whether to make it public or not. Releasing such reports has become the norm over the years, and Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to do it without any redactions.

 

Hur’s real offense is having interviewed Biden in private and told the truth about what he saw. Notably, no one has credibly denied the details. And nothing in Biden’s public performance, including his press conference that included several notable lapses and gaffes, suggests it’s a calumny. The president’s confusion at public events, failing memory, verbal miscues, and stiff gait all indicate serious physical and cognitive decline.

 

Biden’s ability to carry out his public duties is already degraded and will presumably only become more so with time, while there’s no way to know how he is operating behind closed doors. His condition would be alarming enough in a deputy secretary of state, let alone the most demanding job on the planet that visibly ages — and sometimes breaks down — much younger men.

 

To seek another four years in office in this state is a gross disservice to the public. If Biden wins — which is quite possible given that he’s running against a radioactive opponent in an improving economic climate — it’s impossible to believe that he’d be able to do the job through another term.

 

The history is that White House insiders are rarely forthcoming about a president’s ill health, which raises the prospect of an effort to cover for a nonperforming president. This would constitute an ongoing crisis. On the other hand, if Biden were ever compelled to hand over the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris, it would represent the elevation of a president not elected to the office. Needless to say, this would not be a good thing for our politics, particularly when Democrats will have spent most of the campaign dismissing the possibility that Harris would ever become president this way.

 

It would be better to spare the country either of these eventualities, or other distressing scenarios it’s easy to imagine arising from his frailty.

 

Biden is too old for this. He and his wife Jill should have come to that conclusion last year and declined to undertake another campaign. If they had, he could have gone out as the elder statesman who made a selfless decision after — as the Democrats see it — saving the country from Trump and transforming the economy for the better. Multiple candidates would have had the opportunity to emerge in a competitive primary process. The chance for anything as normal as that has now passed, but Biden still owes it to the country to withdraw from the 2024 race.

 

If he can’t continue to do the job, he shouldn’t seek the office. He might imagine that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump or deliver on the Democratic agenda. As de Gaulle famously said, though, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. We wish Joe Biden many happy returns, but they should occur in retirement, where the inevitable effects of his aging will have no public consequences.