The President Isn’t Home

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, February 09, 2024

 

This week began with an NBC poll finding that just 23 percent of voters thought that Joe Biden had “the necessary mental and physical health to be president.” It ended with Joe Biden whisper-shouting dissuasively, “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.” Minutes later, he confused the president of Egypt with that of Mexico.

 

Also this week, Biden recalled talking to François Mitterrand last year, despite the former French premier’s death in 1996. A few days later, he mentioned a 2021 conversation he had with Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who reunited Germany in 1991, left office in 1998, and died in 2017. He told a Democratic audience that he was a Catholic and opposed to abortion on demand, but thought that the Supreme Court was wrong to overturn Roe (which mandates abortion on demand). Then a report came out of the Department of Justice explaining that Biden had mishandled classified documents, but that prosecuting him would be fruitless because he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

 

That final report by special counsel Robert Hur detailed that the president of the United States couldn’t accurately recall the years he was vice president and that he could not identify, “even within several years,” when his son Beau died. It was by reacting to this report as he did Thursday night that Biden confirmed the worst. It wasn’t just that he confused the names of the Egyptian president and Mexico’s. It was that he yelled about his own impotence. “I didn’t know how half the boxes got in my garage,” he said. To another reporter he shouted, “That’s just your opinion!” And thereby he dismissed the public’s concern with his age in a way that made him look exactly like many senile people do when they are denying their present diminishment. He insisted his memory of Beau was sound and then demonstrated it wasn’t when he said he got the rosary beads from “Our Lady of” and then blanked out.

 

There are other more subtle signs in the last few weeks that the presidency is effectively vacant. The administration’s line on Israel has changed from Biden’s stout support to the most bizarre form of axe-grinding, including the sanctioning of four Israeli settlers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s suggestion that Israel’s response in Gaza verged on the inhumane, and Biden’s saying that Israel’s response is “over the top.” These gestures are nonsensical political responses to the stimuli of far-left chants about “Genocide Joe.” But they are no more effective than a beheaded animal’s final bodily spasms.

 

Joe Biden and America are at risk of becoming metaphorically conflated. The country is aging rapidly. The number of Americans over 65 is set to double in the next 40 years. His forgetfulness mirrors America’s own lack of historical perspective. His unsteadiness on the stage is like our own lack of confidence in the national institutions upon which our lives depend for security and independence. His absence of mind seems to reflect the country’s own absence of strategy on the world stage. America is the old power on the world stage, while others are rising.

 

More to the point in an election year, our lack of confidence in Biden’s abilities mirrors a similar sinking feeling about the direction of our country. Not even good economic numbers can put to bed America’s sense of unease, fragility, and vulnerability.

 

There is a great majority in this country who looks upon the forthcoming presidential election with something like sullen horror. Why are our institutions producing this rematch? What is it about American democracy that is so paralyzed? Why, for fear of small risks, are we gambling, well, everything on these geezers?