Dead Campaign Walking

‘A re you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” That was the question Julián Castro addressed to his opponent Joe Biden during the Democratic presidential primary debate in September 2019.

After the debate, Castro was backed up by fellow candidate Cory Booker, who wondered aloud whether the 77-year-old Biden had the vitality to be elected in 2020.

“I think that we are at a tough point right now because there’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling,” Booker told CNN. “There are definitely moments where you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.”

Everyone saw what was happening to the former vice president, but once Biden had the Democratic nomination locked up, nobody on his side spoke of it again. The only people who kept hammering away at Biden’s deteriorating cognitive capacity were Republicans. Soon, most media outlets began framing such concerns with the ubiquitous “Republicans pounce” formulation. The real story, as the media saw it, was that Donald Trump and his acolytes were being cruel, and the press therefore dismissed what voters were clearly seeing before their eyes. (If the Biden we see is the one they allow to be in public, imagine what they’re covering up.)

It is no surprise, then, that legacy media outlets are now trying to catch up, pretending as if the Biden-Trump debate was some massive pivot point in the 2024 election.

But recalling the movie The Sixth Sense, the Biden campaign has been dead all along; they just didn’t know it. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, the incumbent president has been behind Trump since September 2023 — all while Trump was spending a good deal of time as a defendant and having judgments handed down against him in New York courts, with plenty more charges to come elsewhere. Despite obtaining the handy moniker “convicted felon” to hang around Trump’s neck, Biden was still behind when he walked onstage for the first debate.

If the debate prompted a downturn for Biden, it is because it reinforced what everyone knew all along — that he was too old and infirm to serve as president for four more years. His staff knew it and covered it up. Reporters knew it and believed it would make them look like MAGA shills if they broached the subject. And then it all blew up on the debate stage.

If Biden were a more likable, sympathetic old man, he might still have the public on his side. It wasn’t that long ago that Missouri voters actually elected a dead man to the U.S. Senate. Governor Mel Carnahan, who had died in a plane crash 20 days before the election, didn’t just beat a yahoo in the 2000 Senate election, he bested John Ashcroft, who would go on to become U.S. attorney general. After Carnahan won, his wife, Jean, was appointed to fill the office.

But Biden has no such goodwill because Americans have found his backup plan to be unsatisfactory. Vice President Kamala Harris is even less popular than Biden is; she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary with 3.5 percent of the vote. Expecting her to become a plausible presidential candidate would be like asking the Oakland A’s to contend for the World Series next year.

Perhaps more distasteful than Biden’s defiant declarations that he’s staying in the race are the talking points used by those still supporting him. As has been said over and over, Biden is putting himself before his country; at the same time he is warning that Trump is an “existential” threat to democracy, he is making it almost certain that Trump will be reelected. Every one of Biden’s fiery denunciations of his critics should contain the coda, “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message.”

“But why aren’t the media talking about Trump?” bleat the Bidenistas, desperate to take the focus off their candidate, who is melting in plain sight like the guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. They pretend that the media have not covered Trump nonstop for nine years and that there is some piece of negative information about Trump that, if only voters knew it, it could turn the election around. They seem to believe that the rapid deterioration of a man who currently serves as president isn’t a monumental story.

They further believe that this campaign will be won based on “issues,” which is so adorable, you want to pat them on the head and give them a cookie. The primary “issue” Biden thinks will drag him over the finish line is abortion, but Roe v. Wade is already a distant memory. They actually believe having Kamala Harris out on the trail wailing about “choice” is their golden ticket to a second term. Further, the “issues” work against Biden just as much as they work for him — if the border or inflation become the major issues rather than Biden’s mental capacity, he is sunk.

As for the current parties, one has a candidate they wish would stop talking and the other has a candidate who they’re never sure can start talking. Both have succumbed to the delusion that their guy is fit for the presidency.

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker said this week that “of course” Biden was mentally and physically fit to serve the rest of this term and four more years in office. “He’s going to be at the convention in August, accepting the nomination, and I’ll be cheering for him in the audience.” Pritzker is considered a leading contender to run if Biden has to drop out.

So it is clear Biden isn’t the only Democrat who has lost his mind.