Biden Is No Longer Fit For Office
The debate last Thursday made painfully obvious that Joe Biden now suffers from significant mental impairment. There has been a good deal of speculation on social media as to the precise nature of it. But whatever the correct medical diagnosis may prove to be, it is obvious that his moments of lucidity alternate with times at which he is visibly disoriented and his trains of thought trail off into the wilderness.
Even Biden’s own team, in trying to make a case for their struggling principal, have tacitly admitted the extent of the problem. One briefing emphasized that Biden is usually in full control of his mental capacities between the hours of 10am and 4pm, a statement that was unwittingly revealing about the condition his team finds him in during the rest of the day.
Biden’s struggles were on such visible display during the debate that they finally blew away the taboo about commenting on his mental decline, which had held complete sway over the mainstream media until this spring, and continued to restrain the candor of many pundits even after that. In a remarkable example of what the Turkish-American political scientist Timur Kuran calls “preference cascades,” the conventional wisdom has, in the span of less than a week, made a 180-degree turn. If it still took bravery, however modest, to call for Biden to step aside at this time last week, the ranks of his champions have now, for the most part, dwindled to naked partisans on #Resistance Twitter. From the editor of The New Yorker to the editorial board of The New York Times, the voices of institutional authority are now urging Biden to step down.
But as I was reading the various hand-wringing calls for Biden to do what decency requires, I was struck by the extent to which most of these new, supposedly forthright, assessments continue to be mealy-mouthed about the true nature of the current situation. Take the statement by the New York Times editorial board. It begins with a condemnation of Donald Trump, noting that he is an “erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust.” It goes on to lavish fulsome praise on Biden, calling him an “admirable” president; “under his leadership,” the paper of record claims, “the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal.” After the throat-clearing, the true point of the article is finally revealed: “There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. … It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.”
I agree with the editorial board’s assessment of Trump. Its praise for Biden’s presidency seems to me far too lavish, but insincere flattery has always been a mainstay of funeral orations. What strikes me as the truly culpable omission is that the entire article is written in the posture of campaign advice: Trump is dangerous. Democrats need to beat him to protect our democratic institutions. And since Biden, on account of his infirmity, is no longer the best bet for doing so, he should step down.
What goes unmentioned in the entire article—and, for the most part, in other recent calls for Biden to step down—is an acknowledgment of the substantive reasons why Americans might not want to be governed for another four years by a mentally impaired octogenarian whose faculties are visibly deteriorating at a rapid pace.
For the administration to set out a clear direction for the country and push forward important legislation, you need a leader capable of formulating and implementing a vision. For the vast apparatus of the federal bureaucracy to accomplish anything beyond routine tasks, you need a manager who pushes and probes and admonishes. And in the case of a genuine geopolitical emergency, you need a statesman who is capable of making the toughest of calls—potentially including decisions about whether to deploy nuclear weapons—in a matter of minutes. A team of politicos vying for the favor of a flailing principal simply isn’t capable of leading the most powerful country on earth, no matter how smart or decent each of them may happen to be. (And as Quico Toro rightly points out below, the fact that Biden’s team has evidently misled the public about the president’s true condition for the past months is a reason to fear that they may not be quite as decent as they seem.)
Yes, Biden should drop out of the race because he deserves a dignified end to a distinguished life and career. Yes, Biden should drop out of the race because it is vitally important to beat Trump. But most obviously of all, Biden should drop out of the race because he is no longer fit to be president of the United States.