Biden’s ‘physical’ is long overdue and so is his withdrawal from 2024 race
Quin Hillyer
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President Joe Biden’s shamefully belated full physical exam is now scheduled for Feb. 16, but we need no doctor’s assessment to know, intuitively and by observation, that Biden is too old to run for reelection.
Then again, he was too old to run in 2020, the year he turned 78, just as former President Donald Trump will be too old at 78 to run in 2024. Biden has not been anywhere near the “top of his game,” and the health of the U.S. polity has suffered because of it.
BIDEN’S ALTERNATIVE REALITY ON EVERYTHING, INCLUDING ABORTION
For example, one sign of a sort of sclerosis can be rigidity or lack of flexibility of thought. Well, Biden’s once-storied willingness to bargain with the other party and to engage with the media has almost vanished, and that failure of interactive ability quite arguably has added to the poisonous political atmosphere that undermines public trust in the constitutional system.
Members of the media rightly began asking Biden for an updated physical report around Thanksgiving 2022 since, by then, it had been a full year since the previous time his doctor had insisted, despite appearances to the contrary, that Biden was fit for office. The White House indicated a physical would be conducted and reported by year’s end, and then by the end of January, but it met neither deadline.
Most people deserve the right to keep their medical information private. A president of the United States, though, is not like most people. Because he is the leader of the free world on a globe full of terrorists and nuclear weapons, his health and ability to respond deftly in a crisis can mean life or death for millions, even tens of millions, of people.
That’s why, after criticism for being less than fully forthcoming about how close former President Ronald Reagan had come to death after an assassination attempt, the Reagan White House subsequently set a high standard for transparency about the president’s health, even down to granular details of surgery for colon polyps. The four next presidents largely hewed to this admirable example. Alas, Trump made a mockery of things by insisting that a doctor proclaim him (absurdly) “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” and later by flat-out lying about the severity of his bout with coronavirus while conspicuously mingling with others when he knew he was contagious.
Especially as an octogenarian, Biden owes it to the public to be as transparent as Reagan rather than as obfuscatory as Trump. Rarely in world history has a man so old taken on another term of national leadership. By Election Day 2024, Biden will be even older than Winston Churchill was when Churchill ended what, in some senses, was seen as a largely ceremonial encore term as prime minister of Great Britain.
And Biden regularly shows his age. There’s almost not a day that passes without social media being full of yet newfound examples of Biden looking and acting confused, walking in the wrong direction even in familiar settings, and sometimes babbling almost incoherently. Remember that this isn’t just an ordinary man in his 80s, some of whom remain quite fit. This is a man who this very month will mark the 35th anniversary of two massive, life-threatening brain aneurysms and a pulmonary embolism.
This next physical exam, with a full public report, will come not a moment too soon. When it does, the public has a right to a report that is exhaustive.
Either way, nobody should pretend Biden can carry the burdens of free world leadership until he is 86, which is what he would be at the end of a second term. A patriot would not put his nation through the challenges of having an incapacitated president. Biden absolutely should not run again.
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