Biden is running for president again at the age of 81. I voted for him in 2020 believing he would serve one-term, get the country back on track after the disastrous Trump years, and then ride off into the sunset. Over at The New Republic, Walter Shapiro believes that Biden’s decision to run for a second term is an act of selfishness. Here is a taste of his piece:
Democrats are still reeling from special counsel Robert Hur’s explosive report portraying the 81-year-old Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” The prosecutor claimed that the president couldn’t even remember when his son Beau died. In a hastily arranged appearance before the White House press corps Thursday night, a livid Biden attacked Hur’s reference to Beau snarling, “How the hell dare he raise that.” But Biden marred the dramatic effect by later maladroitly referring to Abdel Fattah El Sisi as the president of Mexico rather than Egypt.Â
The cleanup crew spent the weekend defending Biden. The substance of his answer on Gaza was praised for calling the Israeli response “over the top.” White House talking points, obtained by the Associated Press, ridiculed Hur (a former U.S. attorney for Maryland) as a “MAGA-appointed attorney who doesn’t have a case so he decided to lob personal attacks against the president.” Media coverage of Hur’s report was likened to the press pack’s hysterical overreaction to Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign.
But no matter how Democrats spin it, Biden’s age (fairly or not) is the most likely factor to hand Donald Trump a vengeance-is-mine second term. A chilling NBC News poll, released before the Hur report last week, found that 62 percent of the voters called it a “major concern” that Biden would not have the “mental and physical health” for a second term as president.Â
What is equally telling is the number of Democratic insiders who privately groused that the White House should never have allowed Biden to talk to the press on Thursday after a long day of governing. But running for president when the Constitution is on the line is a grueling challenge that often requires adrenaline to substitute for adequate rest.Â
The issue, alas, is not how effectively Biden has governed but rather how the octogenarian president will come across as a candidate against Trump over the next nine months.Â
Biden is stuck in a Catch-22. The only way to combat the nefarious—and totally unproven and likely unprovable—charges that Biden is senile is to send the president out in public for long stints without a teleprompter. But every time Biden emerges from the protective cocoon surrounding him, he runs the risk of misspeaking as he did last week when he conjured up dead twentieth-century European leaders (François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl) in place of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel.
Of course, the oft-indicted Trump is 77 years old himself, increasingly disconnected from reality, and his public remarks often have the mental heft of a dead battery. But somehow in his vitriolic rage and nutcase soliloquies, Trump comes across as a rotund, late middle-aged man with a ludicrous comb-over. In the NBC poll, only 34 percent of voters worried about Trump’s mental and physical fitness as a president in 2025. Â
We are sadly coming to grips with the sobering implications of Biden’s decision last April to run for another term. This may prove to be the most self-indulgent act by a Democratic president in modern history. By misjudging his own capabilities as a 2024 candidate, Biden has increased the odds of a Trump restoration.
Read the rest here.