Joe Biden senile? Don’t say I didn’t warn you

Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP

Almost exactly a year ago in this column I predicted Joe Biden was unlikely to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president this year.

“The President’s frequent physical and verbal stumbles make a mockery of the idea that he could hold his own in a series of high-stakes presidential debates, which will take place in the lead-up to the November 2024 poll, setting the party up for a potentially catastrophic moment where the President’s support crumbles, live on air,” I wrote on June 26, 2023.

That moment well and truly arrived last week, minus the word “potentially”. An excruciating 90 minutes of television shredded the President’s credibility and re-election prospects. It’s surely only a matter of time before he announces he won’t be standing again. The debate was the beginning of the end.

“Everyone is freaking the f..k out,” according to one White House insider, who spoke to Axios this week. After a few days of stunned silence, the dam wall cracked on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) when Nancy Pelosi, empress emerita of the ruling party, dispensed with the “wise and experienced” talking points Americans have been rolling their eyes at for a year. Was Biden’s performance “a condition or an episode”, she asked, urging the President to volunteer for “not one, maybe two” interviews without a teleprompter.

US vice president Kamala Harris.

Democrat senator James Clyburn, a long-term Biden loyalist and the co-chair of the President’s re-election campaign, said he’d support Harris if Biden stepped down. “We should do everything we can do bolster her, whether it’s in second place or at the top of the ticket,” he said, as a fresh batch of post-debate polls showed the President trailing Donald Trump by even more than his deputy.

Lloyd Doggett, of Lyndon Johnson’s old district, became the first Democrat congressman to call for Biden to step aside. We should expect this to turn into a small flood in the coming days, as politicians seek to curry favour with the incoming regime.

The well-connected journalist Tucker Carlson summed it up well: “Too many prominent Democrats have suggested he’s brain damaged. They can’t walk that back. They have to remove him, and they will”.

These aren’t the only signs. On Monday, the President refused to take questions about whether he would stay on. Within a few days the probability of his winning in November plunged from 37 per cent to 16 per cent, as Harris’s chance doubled to 10 per cent.

Where I was wrong last year, was about the Vice-President. “Vote for Biden, and get Kamala, the Republican argument will go. And don’t expect Harris, a heartbeat away from an office she could never win herself, to voluntarily relinquish her position,” I wrote at the time.

But the 60-year-old former attorney general of California is the most obvious and logical replacement for Biden. She’s the only Democrat who can hang onto the roughly $US200m ($300m) in campaign funds Biden has raised and, according to CNN’s latest poll, the only major one since the debate, she’s already polling better than Biden, within the margin of error.

If the Democrats were serious about winning in November they’d push to make Harris president now; the imprimatur of office for a few months could only improve her chances. Whether they can convince Biden not only to stand aside but forego six months in the White House remains to be seen. By hiding Biden’s actual state for months, even years, the Democrats have set themselves up for years of ridicule. On TV this week, veteran journalist Carl Bernstein said that on at least 15 occasions in the last year he’d been told Biden had “appeared like he did at that horror show”, becoming “very stiff … almost like a kind of rigor mortis” at a fundraiser in New York last year.

It’s easy to make fun of all this, but the question arises: to what extent have the big policy calls of the Biden administration been influenced by dementia or some other condition in the past three years?

It’s a scary question. Reporting this week suggested White House staff were “scared shitless” to give any information to the President that would contradict his prior decisions. In my opinion at least, some of the calls have been, objectively, shockingly bad. Since Biden came to office he’s made four terrible calls. The massive $US2 trillion stimulus package in early 2021 has triggered the inflation that has so undermined US living standards.

The late 2021 Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all private sector workers, overturned by the Supreme Court, has trashed confidence in public health.

The refusal to negotiate or even speak to Vladimir Putin over the conflagration in Ukraine has set the US and Russia on the path towards a potential nuclear confrontation. And the White House’s bizarre refusal to do anything until very recently to stem the millions of immigrants pouring over the southern border. Perhaps more than anything, this inaction condemned the party to a heavy loss in November.

These positions have been embraced by the party at large, but only because Biden pushed them. Most people, perhaps most politicians, simply do whatever their political leader tells them to do, often with little thought of their own. If democracy is on the ballot in November, as Democrats love to say, then so is dementia, and most Americans will most likely take their chances with another Trump presidency, rather than witness a possible death of their President in office. The Democrats’ only hope now is to roll the dice with Kamala Harris.