By Jim Geraghty
Friday,
February 09, 2024
President
Joe Biden has not sat down for a formal television interview with any news
outlet since October. He has not held a formal press conference
since the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in November. That day, he took four questions. As noted yesterday, Biden didn’t make any televised address
to the nation when the U.S. launched airstrikes against the Houthis in January,
nor when he ordered airstrikes against other Iranian proxy groups in Iraq and
Syria earlier this month. Biden didn’t give any Election Night remarks as he
romped to a big win in the South Carolina Democratic primary. And Biden is
skipping the traditional Super Bowl Sunday interview for the second straight
year.
Biden
has been strangely absent and unavailable for questions for almost his entire
presidency, and this comes after the “basement campaign” of 2020.
You’ve
heard a lot of statistics about Biden’s age, but here’s a really revealing one:
The day Biden was sworn in as vice president in 2009, he was already the
sixth-oldest vice president in U.S. history. By the time Biden left the role in
2017, he was the second oldest, behind Harry Truman’s veep, Alben Barkley.
During the 1996 presidential election, Time magazine asked, on
its cover, “Is [Bob] Dole too old for the job?” At the time, Dole was
nine years younger than Biden is today.
We’ll
get to the special counsel’s report and last night’s train wreck of a press
conference in a moment, but let’s examine why just 23 percent of Americans
think that Biden has the necessary mental and physical health to be president
when compared to Donald Trump, according to that most recent NBC News poll. (Forty-six
percent of Americans think Trump has the necessary mental and physical health
to be president compared to Biden, 3 percent think both would be good, and 28
percent think neither would be good.)
Back
on August 19, 2021, at the height of the Afghanistan crisis, I wrote one of my
most-read editions of this newsletter, under the headline, “Something Is Wrong with the President.” It simply pointed
out when and where Biden had appeared in public since the crisis began and what
he had said. I concluded:
Biden is barely appearing in public, not
saying much of anything when he does, not answering any questions outside of
his lone scheduled interview, and sounding angry when he did face questions
from [George] Stephanopoulos. . . . The president either does not remember what
he said on July 8, or he is simply trying to gaslight everyone into believing
that he did warn of the Afghan government’s collapsing.
That
assessment was labeled “the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that
drive people away from public life” by Chris Cillizza, then with CNN. That
is a demonstration of how intensely some people wanted to declare the issue of
Biden’s age, memory, and mental capacities off-limits for public discussion. A
few months later, under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S.
Central Command general Frank McKenzie and Joint Chiefs chairman general Mark
Milley both said they had recommended President Biden
maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. Biden had insisted during the
Stephanopoulos interview that no one had made that recommendation — or, more
specifically, “No one said that to me that I can recall.”
I
think it is more than fair to ask what Biden remembers after his briefings end.
I think the single most predictable
“bombshell” of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob
Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like “Perpetual
Crisis: Inside the Biden White House,” and we will “learn” something like:
The president’s official health report said
he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain,
and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly
declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.
Yesterday,
we received something of a preview of that not-so-surprising revelation.
Special counsel Robert Hur issued his final report on Biden’s handling of
classified documents, concluding that he could not bring criminal charges
because a jury would see the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly
man with a poor memory.” The details are jaw-dropping:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s
memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on
the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did
I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the
interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did
not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory
appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important
to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of
opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally
whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
In a case where the government must prove
that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents
after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was
violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these
limitations in his recall.
The
White House is insisting that Hur is a partisan hack making unfounded
accusations and allegations against the president. No doubt, the president’s
questioning and testimony was recorded. If Hur’s description is such an unfair
characterization of Biden’s testimony, let’s see the transcript and recording.
No
one withholds information that exonerates them.
Sensing
that Hur’s report confirmed what many Americans feared — Biden has a severe
case of CRS (“Can’t Remember Stuff”) — Biden did what he almost never does
anymore: He addressed the country in the evening and took questions from
reporters. It did not go well.
You
don’t have to take it from our Noah Rothman when he says last night’s abruptly
announced prime-time presidential statement and brief Q&A was “an unmitigated disaster.” Or the assessments of Phil, Rich, Charlie, Luther, or Jeff.
You
can look at the assessment of Politico: “A day Biden world wishes it could forget.” Or any of
the quotes from Axios:
“For years now, President Biden’s advisers
have carefully choreographed his every move to avoid what exploded into view
over six hours Thursday: a vivid display of an elderly, irritable man
struggling on a public stage”. . . .
Another former Biden White House official
simply said: “Brutal”. . . .
A former Biden aide described Democrats’
dilemma: “Taking the nomination away from Biden is like taking the car keys
away from your parents.”
Discouraging
our elderly parents from driving absolutely sucks, but we do it because of the
high consequences of the risks. If we can do this to our own parents, why can
those around Biden, and prominent Democrats, not do this for the country? What,
the consequences of a bad decision aren’t severe enough?
Or peruse the assessment of Stephen Collinson of CNN:
Biden appeared fired up and passionate. But
at the same time, his angry demeanor and an event which appeared to quickly
spin out of his control, with reporters shouting questions as he struggled to
interrupt, may have ended up exacerbating the very questions about his age that
it was meant to dispel. . . .
The press event also raised new questions
about his sharpness in a week in which he has twice confused the names of a
serving and recent European leader with those with whom he interacted in the
1980s. . . . And even when he was much younger, Biden had a reputation as a
gaffe machine and for verbal slips. But in the context of Biden’s declaration
that his “memory is fine” his political liability over his age and coming as it
did during an event meant to demonstrate vitality and accurate recall, it was an
unwelcome trip-up to say the least.
Or
ask Susan Glasser of the New Yorker: “Yeesh. ‘President of Mexico’
Sisi. Bad for Biden in an appearance meant to dispel concerns about his age.
What a year this day has been.” This is the same Susan Glasser who wrote in September 2021 that I was
being “wildly overstated” in “consign[ing] Biden to the ash heap of history.”
(Yeah, I keep receipts on everybody.)
Or, hey, look who it is: Chris Cillizza! “That was a very bad
idea to let Biden do that press conference. I assumed he insisted but: 1. He
looked and sounded pissed off. 2. It affirms how worried he (and they) are
about the age and competency issue. 3. Screwing up the El-Sisi thing will just feed
the narrative.”
Why,
Chris, comments like that are “the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator
politics that drive people away from public life”! Nah, not really. But let’s
acknowledge that I and other Biden critics weren’t wrong; we were just ahead of
the curve.
Joe
Biden is too old to be an effective president, and he’s knocking on the door of
being too old to be president, period. It was always absurd to believe that
Biden would be able to handle one of the most challenging jobs in the world as
an octogenarian, and the notion of him serving two full terms and remaining in
the Oval Office until age 86 is ludicrous. Even Biden himself seemed to acknowledge this, back in 2019.
Perhaps
Biden forgot that he once felt that way.
ADDENDUM: An intriguing assessment from our Henry Olsen, concluding that
in the South Carolina Republican primary, Donald Trump is extremely likely
to win but that Nikki Haley will likely perform better than the polls indicate:
“There’s every reason, however, to think that the margin won’t be as large as
26 points if her efforts to get Democrats, independents, and nontraditional
primary voters to polls succeeds at all.”
A
while back, I characterized that state’s primary as winner-take-all, but the state rules
actually allocate 29 delegates for winning statewide, and three for each of
the seven congressional districts that is won. Trump will probably sweep
all seven districts, and win all 50 delegates at stake, but . . . the state’s
sixth district, Jim Clyburn’s district, scores a D+16 on the Cook Partisan
Voting Index. And it includes Bamberg, where Haley grew up. Is there a shot
that Haley wins that district through crossover votes?
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