No moment offers a political party a better opportunity for self-examination than losing the White House after a single term. But the Democratic Party refuses to seize that opportunity. Instead, party leaders and media allies have turned their ire toward the one man with no role in shaping the party’s future: Joe Biden.
Yes, Biden’s four years exposed real structural problems worth sorting out. Friday’s release of special counsel Robert Hur’s tapes exposes just how far gone the president was and raises serious questions about how closely he must have been managed.
Tapper, Thompson, and the rest are covering up the Democrats’ own failings, giving them the excuse they need to avoid any real soul-searching.
Then came Sunday’s revelation that Biden is suffering from an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer — two years after he slipped up and said he had it and one year after his doctor publicly presented a clean bill of health (but declined to take questions).
The White House claimed at the time his claim of having cancer referred to skin cancers that were removed (a common procedure for the elderly), but we know for a fact that the White House lied to the public about his mental health, and the Biden family only revealed this information as the country gets ready for another week of scrutiny on the former president.
None of those problems, however, touch the core philosophical rot Democrats must confront. The reality is that Biden didn’t defeat the Democrats; Vice President Kamala Harris did — and she was a candidate more wounded by her ideas than her campaign’s short runway.
Now, ahead of Tuesday’s release of “Original Sin” — the new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson — the salacious details of Biden’s mental and physical decline have become political gossip. But the truth remains unchanged: Everything the book reveals was painfully obvious to anyone not peering through Democrat-colored lenses for the past five years.
We already knew the president couldn’t remember the names of senior staff. We watched him forget his own defense secretary’s name — even when they stood side by side. We saw the signs of dementia. He stood frozen in place, staring blankly into space for minutes at a time. When asked about it, Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler shrugged and said Biden just doesn’t dance.
We saw the mumbling, the sudden outbursts of anger, the muttered non sequiturs. We saw it again and again. We saw the physical decline, too — how he abandoned the main stairs of Air Force One, how he fell repeatedly in public. After watching him on camera for decades, we could tell his gait had stiffened and grown unsteady.
The book’s only meaningful new claim is that Biden’s staff believed he might need a wheelchair after the campaign. While historically relevant, that detail pales in comparison to the deterioration the public witnessed in real time. He looked bad even before Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary!
So how did a clearly declining man who handily lost both of these primary races end up reversing the narrative and taking the nomination in a barnstorm? That question points to the party’s structural troubles on the one hand, but also to the pox on Democrat priorities infecting them to this day.
For all their talk, the Democrats have a very top-down party structure. The bosses can really move chips around the table when they need to, as was on display when the full weight and power of the party came down on Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ unsanctioned and insurgent 2016 primary campaign against anointed champion Hillary Clinton. In 2020, we saw these gears turn for Joe Biden — starting first in South Carolina.
Joe Biden wasn’t Barack Obama’s first choice. He wasn’t the Clintons’ either. He stood far from the top of his game. So why did Democratic Party leaders rally behind him? Because he was, quite simply, the least insane option on stage. And that points directly to the party’s deeper sickness.
Think back to that 2020 stage, if you can. You had Bernie Sanders, well past his prime and weakened by his reluctant acceptance of woke ideologies; clucking Harvard professor and scold Elizabeth Warren; New York technocrat Michael Bloomberg; nightmare drunk aunt Amy Klobuchar; tiny town mayor Pete Buttigieg; global warming fanatic and hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer; high school snitch Michael Bennet; latecomer Deval Patrick; unknown tech guy Andrew Yang; and veritable Democratic apostate Tulsi Gabbard.
That doesn’t even include perennial loser Beto O’Rourke, Manhattan cuckold Bill de Blasio, China enthusiast Eric Swalwell, illegal immigrant devotee Julián Castro, séance medium Marianne Williamson, or Kamala Harris — all of whom dropped out before the primary even began.
Early on in the debate, moderators asked the candidates if they would decriminalize illegally crossing the border into the United States. Biden was the only one who actually made it to Iowa who opposed this idea. The only one!
Well, this would not do in November, and so nobody’s first choice to take on Donald Trump was anointed in South Carolina, cruising toward Super Tuesday looking like a moderate and a winner, with no need to hold rallies or even a convention, and a corporate press willing to do anything it needed to in order to defeat the incumbent and see a Democrat in the White House again.
Party leaders saw what everyone else saw: Biden was the only candidate who appealed to the Democratic base and could still sell his platform to the broader public. His scripted rise allowed Democrats to gloss over the mess — open borders and a slate of fringe ideas pushed by nearly every other serious contender.
But once in office, the radicals he had outmaneuvered took control. They implemented the very policies voters had rejected. And four years later, when his debate with Trump showed Democrats the charade was finally, mercifully over, they got their woman.
Really, she
wasn’t their woman. She did not even make it to Iowa in 2020 because people didn’t like her, and she hadn’t improved at all since joining the administration. Democrats can claim Biden’s refusal to bow out in time held stunted her ability to convince voters they liked her, but that doesn’t comport with the facts. She had one of the most high-profile jobs in the world for four years, checked (or at least smudged) all the Democratic boxes for being a woman and whatever ethnicity she is, and had the full power of a media coronation behind her.
Kamala Harris served an administration that had divided the people and weakened the country. She was unwilling to offer either a convincing defense or any alternative to the course we were on, and she hoped she could wall herself off from cross-examination. She had spent more than a decade pronouncing and enacting radical policies, and when she ran for president, she could not escape her record, no matter how many flags they put up for the convention.
Remember how her campaign refused to let her talk to reporters until she was obviously trailing? They can complain all they want about not having the time, but when given time, they left it on the table.
The Republicans, meanwhile, ran against the Democrats’ past record, current policies, and future proposals and won the popular vote for the second time in 36 years. Now Democrats and their friends in the news business had both an important and opportune time for introspection.
They chose to do otherwise.
Tapper, Thompson, and the rest aren’t simply covering up the press’ complicity in the farce of the past decade — they’re covering up the Democrats’ own failings, giving them the excuse they need to avoid any real soul-searching. “It’s not our fault,” you can hear the press saying. “It’s the White House’s fault! They lied to us!”
And the Democrats can’t be to blame for their deep unpopularity, either. “It’s Joe’s fault! He stayed in too long! He was too old! Kamala never stood a chance because of him!”
Well, Joe’s gone now. And it’ll be mighty difficult to pick up the pieces while Democrats and their reporters are pretending nothing is broken.
Blaze News: Democrat lawmakers completely flip on Biden’s mental acuity
Glenn Beck: Biden was a puppet, not a president. So who signed the pardons?
Blaze News: The party of democracy just stole an election from itself
Blaze News: Democrats pick Beijing over Trump in shocking trade war poll
Blaze News: Illegal alien teen in blue state avoids jail time despite killing woman in car crash
Blaze News: Harvard staff fall over each other to aid comedian’s fake deportation claim, offer tips to evade ICE
Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter
Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford’s newsletter.
Opinion & analysis, Politics