Bye-bye Biden

The media is saying good-bye to Joe Biden. Some would say that it is also good riddance, but today we limit ourselves to the full throated rationalization of media lies about Biden.

As everyone understood when watching Biden’s June debate with Donald Trump, the president is not there. He is incoherent and obviously mentally defective. The notion that he would be able to do the job for four years became risible. 

And yet, the larger question is quite simple-- has Joe Biden been doing the job for these past four years. In 2020 Dr. Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, opined that Biden was suffering from senile dementia, and that the condition normally advances rapidly.

People whose visceral and mindless hatred of Donald Trump caused them to lie about Joe Biden, are trying to explain themselves.

A normally competent reporter, Peter Baker of the New York Times, offers the party line. According to Baker, Biden is “weary.”

He writes:

Time is catching up with Mr. Biden. He looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day. Aides say he remains plenty sharp in the Situation Room, calling world leaders to broker a cease-fire in Lebanon or deal with the chaos of Syria’s rebellion. But it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.

Of course, Biden and his enablers insist that he was a consequential president. And yet, he has the lowest approval ratings in recorded history and more people consider his presidency a yawning failure than see it as a rousing success.

Of course, good journalism exists. It is not the first time that Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal chronicled Biden’s cognitive incapacity-- she did so in June-- but she wrote about it again yesterday.

The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble. 

This meant that staff was charged with protecting Biden, from public scrutiny, and even from too many meetings with cabinet members.

The structure was also designed to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.

The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public. 

It worked reasonably well, until the June 27 debate:

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.

Biden’s staff had known all about his decline. They accommodated and hid the truth from the public:

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes. 

They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides. 

Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.

The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.

Staff saw that Biden had good and bad days, days when he could function and days that he could not:

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

Most officials and legislators could not get to see Biden. Among those who did, Sen. Joe Manchin:

One lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed that the president lacked stamina and heavily relied on his staff: Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia 

Democrat-turned-independent who held up chunks of Biden’s legislative agenda during the first half of Biden’s term. Manchin said the job required a level of energy that he wasn’t sure Biden had been able to sustain….

Instead of Biden directing follow up, Manchin noticed that Biden’s staff played a much bigger role driving his agenda than he had experienced in other administrations. Manchin referred to them as the “eager beavers”—a group that included then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. “They were going, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” Manchin said.

As for management, Biden was not very good at it. He rarely met with his cabinet and tended not to consult with them before making decisions.

Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said. 

One top cabinet member met one-on-one with the president at most twice in the first year and rarely in small groups, another former senior cabinet aide said. 

Multiple former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in the policymaking process. Some of them said it was hard for them to discern to what degree Biden was insulated because of his age versus his preference for a powerful inner circle.

Gone was any semblance of spontaneity. When Joe was going to answer questions from an audience, Biden’s staff collected the right questions and provided Joe with the answers. One thing they did not want was to have him speak off the cuff. Funnily enough, his vice president was similarly incompetent at interviews.

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

Basically, all of those surrounding Joe Biden knew that he was enfeebled and mentally impaired. And yet, for years they covered up the truth, lying as though their careers depended on it. The problem was, foreign leaders were not so easily fooled and tricked. 

And besides, with the exception of Annie Linskey, the mainstream media colluded with the Biden administration. They were part of the cover-up. Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to admit fault and to apologize for their dereliction.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.