JOE BIDEN DENIES EVERYTHING. Former President Joe Biden and former first lady Jill Biden appeared this week on The View. If you had to boil it down to headlines, there would be two: First, the Bidens both denied reports of the former president’s senility or cognitive difficulties, and second, he blamed voter sexism and racism for the defeat of his designated successor, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
But there was a bigger story: In the act of denying reports of cognitive problems, Joe Biden virtually confirmed that those reports are accurate.
It started when panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin asked, “Mr. President, since you left office, there have been a number of books that have come out, deeply sourced from Democratic sources, that claim in your final year there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities. … What is your response to these allegations, and are these sources wrong?”
“They are wrong,” Joe Biden said. “There’s nothing to sustain that, No. 1.” The former president often makes a series of points by saying “No. 1” or “No. 2,” etc., after he makes each point. The problem this time was that after Joe Biden made point No. 1, he wandered off course before he could make point No. 2.
“No. 2, you know, think of what we were left with,” the former president said. “We were left with a circumstance where we had an insurrection when I started, not since the Civil War, we had a circumstance where we were in a position that we — well, the pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit end up over a million people dying, a million people dying. And we were also in a situation where we found ourselves unable to deal with a lot of just basic issues and which I won’t go into in the interest of time, and so we went to work and got it done. And you know, one of the things — well, I’m…”
Where was Joe Biden going? Beyond saying the reports were wrong, he did not answer the question. And then, after discussing the beginning of his presidency, he did not seem quite sure what to say next. At that point, Jill Biden jumped in: “Alyssa, one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us. And they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he’d put in a full day, and then at night he would — I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop. The White House — being president is not like a job. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a life that you live. You live it 24 hours a day. That phone can ring at 11 o’clock at night or 2 in the morning. It’s constant. You never leave it. And Joe worked really hard. I think he was a great president. And if you look at things today — give me Joe Biden any time.”
OK — that was a defense of Joe Biden against the allegations that he wasn’t up to the job. But the defense did not come from Joe Biden. It came from his wife, the former first lady. Joe Biden himself wasn’t up to making the case that he was up to the job.
In a gentle way, Griffin followed up. “Some of the reporting is that people like the former president you served under, Barack Obama, George Clooney, a longtime supporter of yours, major Democratic donor, Chuck Schumer, your dear friend Nancy Pelosi, also had expressed concerns about your ability to do the job for four more years,” she said. “Can I ask what your relationship is with President Obama and how you address those concerns that they raised?”
That gave Joe Biden another opportunity to address the question. “Look, I think that the only reason I got out of the race was because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party,” he said. “It was a simple proposition, and so that’s why I got out of the race. I thought it was better to put the country ahead of my interests, my personal interests. I’m not being facetious. I’m being deadly earnest about that.”
Throughout the interview, Joe Biden insisted that he did a great job as president and that he left the country, especially the economy, in excellent condition. So why, if he had no cognitive problems and had done such a good job, did he drop out of the 2024 presidential race? To avoid dividing the Democratic Party.
But why did it come to that? Why were Democrats so agitated about the situation back in the summer of 2024? Because of Joe Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate against Donald Trump. In the first minutes of that debate, the nation saw a slow, confused, out-of-it Joe Biden clearly outmatched by his Republican opponent. Host Whoopi Goldberg brought it up when she said, “Well, you know what freaked everybody out was that debate. It wasn’t a great night. It was a bad night, and everybody lost their mind.”
“It was a terrible night,” Joe Biden said. “Terrible night.” The former president tried to argue that his campaign was in good shape when the debate came around, and as bad as it was, the debate night did not reveal any fundamental problems with his campaign. It was just a bit of bad luck. “I was sick,” Joe Biden said. “No excuse, but I had a bad, bad night.” When panelist Ana Navarro asked, “Did you immediately know you had a bad night?” Joe Biden responded, “Yeah, I did, but even after that, the polls showed me down by 2 points.”
The other headline from The View was that Joe Biden blamed the alleged sexism and racism of voters for Harris’s defeat. It worked this way. Since Joe Biden claimed he left the country in great shape, how was it that his designated successor failed to win the election? “You had made the selfless and very difficult decision, I’m sure, to step aside, and Democrats were feeling optimistic about the vice president’s chances of winning the presidency,” panelist Sara Haines said to the former president. “But then election night came, and it was like 2016 all over again. Why do you think the vice president lost, and were you surprised?”
“I wasn’t surprised,” Joe Biden said. “Not because I didn’t think the vice president was the most qualified person to be president. She is. She’s qualified to be president of the United States of America. But I wasn’t surprised because they went the route of the — the sexist route, the whole route. I mean, this is a woman, she’s this, she’s that. I mean, it really — I’ve never seen quite as successful and a consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country. And a woman of mixed race.”
In going on The View, and also doing an interview with the BBC, the former president was clearly hoping to get in front of the age and cognitive issue. But his fundamental problem is that he really was not up to the job of serving as president for a second term. That’s just a fact. Millions of people believed that, and it is unlikely that Joe Biden, who at least in the BBC interview seemed older than just a few months ago, can convince them otherwise.