Yes, You Did

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 06, 2025

 

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer appeared visibly agitated with NBC News’s Kristen Welker on Sunday when he was confronted with remarks he gave last February insisting President Joe Biden was “fine.”

 

“All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity is declining is wrong,” Schumer told reporters in response to the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s report illuminating the extent of Biden’s decline. “What do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden’s mental acuity?” Welker asked. “Look,” Schumer snapped back. “We didn’t!”

 

But you did. We all just saw the clip. There was no ambiguity in that statement. The senator did not hedge or evade the subject. With the utmost authority and confidence, Schumer insisted that the 62 percent of voters who told pollsters that month that Joe Biden did not have “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term” had been bamboozled into that outlook by the preternaturally savvy right-wing disinformation machine.

 

Schumer wasn’t alone. “He’s always on the ball,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at the same time. “Anyone who would think that they’re at some advantage because of his age thinks that at their peril, because he’s very sharp.”

 

“The way that the President’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts,” Vice President Kamala Harris agreed. “And clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.”

 

“It was just a smear and cheap shots and just taking things out of context, or even just inventing,” Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman declared. “So, clearly, there was an agenda there.”

 

“What you have is a grandstander not a prosecutor,” Virginia senator Tim Kaine speculated before noting that he believes Biden is “very vigorously engaged” with his work.

 

Biden is “at the very top of his game,” Minnesota senator Tina Smith mused, “all the way through it, both in private and in person.”

 

If Democrats shared the concerns expressed by Democratic representative Dean Phillips during his brief primary campaign against Biden predicated entirely on the age issue, Rhode Island senator Jack Reed hadn’t encountered them. “I was with a congressional leadership about two weeks ago, and no one walked out of that meeting, saying, ‘Oh, my God, it was like he wasn’t in charge,’” Reed said of Biden.

 

And so on. Democrats sacrificed the public trust over the last two years of Joe Biden’s administration by insisting that the conditions Americans observed with growing trepidation did not exist. It was a lie the voting public bitterly resented, and Democrats were commensurately punished for their hubris. Now, despite the urgent need to repair the party’s rapport with voters, Schumer is still modeling the very same behaviors that cost Democrats dearly at the polls.

 

Whoever it was that told Democrats they were great liars has done this party a world of harm. The party soon to be out of power appears addicted to the notion that it can reshape our reality through the power of rhetoric, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. That delusion serves only to convince Democrats that they will suffer no penalties for the propagation of untruths. The only people they’re fooling are themselves.