How the Democratic Party Closed Its Eyes to Biden’s Decline 

Opinion|How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?

In 2022, after I wrote a column arguing that Joe Biden was too old to run for re-election, I had a bunch of conversations and at least one cable TV debate with Democrats who thought I was wrong. I don’t remember there being much difference between what these Democrats said publicly and privately; I certainly wasn’t hearing off-the-record whispers about Biden’s decline. Instead, officials and pundits I spoke to seemed convinced that it would be crazy for the party to give up the advantages of incumbency, that a primary risked creating nasty fissures among various Democratic factions, and, most relevantly, that Biden’s legislative successes proved he was still up to the job.

Some of them appeared so sure I was mistaken that I wondered if they might be right; these doubts are why, to my shame, I didn’t write another column calling on him to step aside until the next year.

For many people, Republicans especially, the Democratic Party’s ongoing insistence that Biden was basically fine looks like a fraud committed against the electorate. In “Original Sin,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s explosive new book about Biden’s deterioration, they call the widespread refusal to admit how bad he had become a “cover-up.”

There was certainly some covering up going on, especially among Biden’s insular inner circle. But more than lying to the public about Biden’s increasing infirmity, I think too many Democrats were lying to themselves. The “original sin” that party leaders now need to grapple with is their tendency toward groupthink, inertia and an extreme and wildly counterproductive risk aversion.

Plenty of Democrats are annoyed that “Original Sin” has catapulted the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement back into the news, threatening to distract voters from Donald Trump’s rococo corruption. I think, though, that Tapper and Thompson have done the party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that paved the way for Trump’s return. It’s better for Democrats to rip off the Band-Aid now than to let the issue fester until the next election, and to try to glean some bitter lessons from their collective failure. Party officials burned a lot of credibility defending Biden’s cognitive fitness. As they seek to earn it back, they should be honest about what they got wrong.

Politically, the easiest move for Democrats is to dump all the blame onto Biden, his family and the clique of longtime aides Tapper and Thompson call “the Politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed. This group certainly deserves to be excoriated; Tapper and Thompson marshal lots of evidence that Biden was even worse behind the scenes than in public, and those closest to the president tightly restricted access to him to obscure the problem. They quote a senior White House aide who left because he or she didn’t want to see Biden run again: “We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline.”