President Joe Biden’s cascading confusion means Democrats have a problem similar to the one America faces as it slides ever deeper into debt. The crisis clearly requires action. You can pretend it isn’t real in the short term, but it won’t get better and won’t go away. It will only get worse. And the longer you delay, the harder and more painful fixing it will be.
Just as continued overspending means more interest payments on mounting debt, so obdurate allegiance to Biden means his blue surrogates spend more time denying what’s increasingly obvious — that the guy is going gaga. In politics, it’s understood that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Telling a skeptical public that the dusty president is fired up and raring to go for another five years in the hardest job in the world is unpersuasive.
None of us gets out of here alive, and 81-year-old Biden is not going to level out onto a plateau of acceptable lucidity. He is going to step down again and again until he reaches the cellar door.
The expectation that he will blunder repeatedly makes Biden’s public appearances hard to watch. Seeing him on TV is akin to watching a chimp clumsily handling a vase. Will he let it fall and break into a thousand pieces? And as John Stewart noted on the Daily Show this week, it’s the politico’s job to persuade the public that all is well. It’s not the public’s job to turn a blind eye to an alarming problem.
Democrats have temporarily seized on special counsel Robert Hur as a new bogeyman they can excoriate. His offense is to notice Biden’s failing functionality. Hur decided not to prosecute the president for improper handling of classified documents and told Attorney General Merrick Garland that this was because the jury might exculpate Biden for being “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Angry Democrats know this explanation does Biden immense political harm as he seeks reelection in November. So they are blasting Hur for going further than a straightforward decision one way or the other. They say he should have avoided his dynamite obiter dicta. Typical of Hur’s frothed-up critics was journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who in her ignorance suggested the special counsel shouldn’t have commented because he was “not a neurologist” and “knows nothing about memory problems in any way.”
But Hur, as special counsel, is legally obliged to explain to the Department of Justice why a jury is unlikely to convict. His comments about Biden coming across as a chucklehead were not otiose, therefore, but required, and are central to the problem of who we have in the White House.
The Democrats’ fixation on Hur will be short-lived, and they will soon be staring in the face of Biden’s increasing unsuitability for another lease on the Oval Office. Here is their dilemma. Should they try to keep the lid on, and pooh-pooh Biden’s every gaffe until November, in the hope of sneaking him under the wire of reelection? Or should they open the can of worms now, force Biden to stand down, and replace him with a candidate more likely to beat Donald Trump?
The two ugly choices are racing neck and neck with neither pulling ahead because the anguish of living with Biden’s blunders increases at the same pace as anxiety over the public relations disaster that would be caused by his cynical defenestration. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on Tuesday, “Democrats are bloodier-minded about power than are GOP primary voters.” That suggests they will take action. Whereas the MAGA crowd will cling to its leader no matter how unpopular he is nationally, Democrats are less likely to let emotion get in the way of ruthless determination to wield power.
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Thus the temptation of people such as Obama-henchman David Axelrod to slip a stiletto between Biden’s ribs will grow as the president becomes more and more of a liability. Replacement candidates are already widely discussed. Would Democrats pick the hapless Vice President Kamala Harris or the slimy Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) who is presiding over California’s descent into dysfunction with his population fleeing to better-run states? Other deus ex machina candidates including Michelle Obama and even Hillary Clinton are being mentioned.
None of these seem likely, and yet it is surely almost equally impossible that Democrats will keep betting on Biden as more and more pieces keep falling off him. We are in uncharted territory. This is a political journey without a map.