How Annoyed Am I By The Coverage of Joe Biden's Health?

Let me count the ways.

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Number One

I didn’t intend on spending so much of the week writing about Joe Biden … but WTAF?

Joe Biden's physical deterioration was so severe in 2023 and 2024 that advisers privately discussed the possibility he'd need to use a wheelchair if he won re-election, CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson write in their new book, "Original Sin," out May 20.

Why it matters: The discussions reflected the extent of the president's declining health — particularly the significant degeneration of his spine — and his aides' alarm over it as Biden sought a second term at age 81.

The conversations also reveal the White House's determination to conceal the reality of Biden's condition, at the risk of his own health, while he faced a tough re-election bid against Donald Trump.

… "Given Biden's age, [his physician Kevin O'Connor] also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery," the authors report.

How is this even a story? Biden was 81 years old. It’s hardly shocking that he might need a wheelchair if he had a ”bad fall” - but so what? Franklin Roosevelt spent his entire 12 years in office in a wheelchair. He did a pretty good job as president!

Even if Biden needed to use a wheelchair, that hardly speaks to his abilities to carry out the duties of the president. What is the criticism of the White House here? Were they supposed to tell the American people that their 81-year-old boss might need to use a wheelchair if something happened in the future? Considering how this is being reported now, it’s not hard to imagine they didn’t want to say that!

I have no issue with reporters looking into Biden’s age-related infirmities — and I think it’s pretty clear now that Biden should not have sought reelection — but that’s an entirely separate issue from his physical health. This story has all the markings of a clickbait story to promote “Original Sin,” but if you think about what it suggests, it comes across as a crude and ableist attack.

Number Two

In his review of Original Sin in the Washington Post, Alex Shepherd writes, “Of the many virtues of 'Original Sin,' the greatest is its stubborn focus on Biden's health as not just the most important factor in the 2024 election but the sole defining reason for Trump's victory."

So now we’ve gone from Biden “guaranteed” Trump’s 2024 victory to his health being “the sole defining reason” that Trump won the presidency. This is beyond ludicrous.

First of all, there is never a sole defining reason for the way that 150 million Americans cast a ballot for president. One of my many frustrations with the Biden health story is the underlying assumption that it represents some magic bullet explanation for how and why Americans voted in 2024. We know, from reams of political data, that the best predictor of how Americans cast a ballot is party affiliation and past voting patterns. A good 90 percent of the electorate, particularly in our current era of political polarization, knows who they will vote for long before the candidates are chosen.

Second, as I’ve noted more times than I care to remember, every incumbent party in the world lost voter share in 2024. According to Shepherd, anti-incumbency and anger over higher inflation played no meaningful role in Trump’s victory, even though it impacted incumbent parties in every other democratic election in 2024. Does that make any sense?

Lastly, I can’t believe I need to point this out, but Joe Biden wasn’t on the presidential ticket in 2024! Did Kamala Harris’s approximately 100-day campaign play no role in the 2024 outcome? How about Donald Trump’s four-year effort to win back the White House?

It would be a bit much to say that Biden’s health issues played no role in what happened in 2024, but to argue that it was the sole determining factor — even the dominant factor — should disqualify anyone making that argument from writing about presidential politics.

Number Three

Oh FFS …

Joe Biden may have cost Democrats the White House in 2024. Their inability to admit it, some Democrats fear, could hobble them in 2028.

As a fresh reckoning in the party unfolds around the former president’s mental acuity, potential presidential contenders have mostly dodged questions about his condition while in office. They’ve also sidestepped whether the party should have more forcefully called on him to abandon his reelection bid earlier.

…. For the most part, leading Democrats — many of whom attested to Biden’s fitness when he was still on the ticket — are ducking what is fast becoming the first real litmus test of the 2028 campaign. The problem for Democrats is Biden’s blast radius keeps expanding. It isn’t just the embarrassing accounts dribbling out from a forthcoming book. It’s that so many Democrats with 2028 ambitions were defending him at the time — and are now being forced to answer for what they knew and when.

… Some Democrats argue that their leaders aren’t owning up to the truth about Biden — and risk keeping the issue alive indefinitely as a result. They fear that Democrats’ record-low approval ratings are tied, in part, to their unwillingness to come clean.

First of all, this isn’t a litmus test. Support for abortion rights or gun control is a political litmus test. What someone did or didn’t say in 2024 about Joe Biden’s health is not.

Second, there is zero evidence that Democrats’ low approval ratings have anything to do with what party officials did or didn’t say about Biden.

Third, media members who are obsessing over this story need to pick a lane. The Tapper and Thompson book argues that the White House was determined “to conceal the reality of Biden's condition.” But if that’s true, why is the burden being placed on Democrats, not in Biden’s inner circle, to have spoken frankly about his supposedly enfeebled condition? Weren’t they kept in the dark, too?

Moreover, there’s an underlying assumption in much of the reporting on Biden’s health that he was basically catatonic throughout his presidency. But that’s simply not true — and we have ample evidence that proves it. Here, for example, is the New York Times’ Peter Baker writing about Biden’s March State of the Union address on March 8, 2024 — nearly four months before the fateful debate with Trump.

This was not Old Man Joe. This was Forceful Joe. This was Angry Joe. This was Loud Joe. This was Game-On Joe.

In an in-your-face election-year State of the Union address, President Biden delivered one of the most confrontational speeches that any president has offered from the House rostrum, met by equally fractious heckling from his Republican opponents.

… Frustrated by all the talk about his age and determined to dispel voter doubts, Mr. Biden, 81, used the most prominent platform of this election year, with what is likely the largest television and internet audience he will address before November, to exhibit his stamina, his vitality, his capacity and, yes, his umbrage.

… For many watching, the speech presumably generated a different impression of Mr. Biden than he sometimes leaves in public appearances, when he can seem frail and halting. While he mangled his lines at points and interrupted his speech to cough a couple times, he came across as far more commanding and energized, reassuring some of his supporters.

If you didn’t see Biden daily, it was very easy to conclude from watching this speech that he could handle the rigors of a presidential campaign.

Even after his disastrous June 28 debate with Trump, Biden repeatedly demonstrated a keen grasp of the issues facing the country. On July 11, he gave a solo, nearly hour-long press conference that was the complete opposite of the doddering performance only two weeks earlier. You can watch the video or read the transcript for yourself.

The thing is, even if Democrats were concerned about Biden, by the Spring of 2024, there wasn’t much to do about it. The primaries had already taken place. No one had seriously challenged Biden on the age issue, and if Democrats were concerned, their votes showed otherwise. That Democrats chose to rally around the president and hope for the best is precisely what you would expect to happen.

This is not to say that Biden didn’t suffer from some cognitive impairments or that he had good days and bad days. I honestly don’t know the former and the latter, everyone seems to acknowledge. But I think the Biden team has a point when they argue, “We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.” Maybe that evidence is in Tapper and Thompson’s book, but I haven’t seen it so far.

I get that both men want to sell books, and I also understand that reporters are deeply fixated on this story. But at a time when the current president is cognitively impaired and regularly spouts nonsense about a host of policy issues, doesn’t understand the policies he’s implementing, appears to be unaware of decisions made by his staff, and is regularly engaging in insanely corrupt behavior, I have a hard time caring about whether the last president had good days and bad days.

The fact is, even on Biden’s worst day, he knew far more about government and public policy than Trump has in his entire life. Maybe some enterprising reporters could dig more deeply into that story and whether those around Trump are covering up for his ongoing age-related infirmities.

Lastly, the idea that this will be a problem for Democrats in 2028 is downright silly. By 2028, the electorate will have long forgotten about Joe Biden and his health. If reporters persist in asking about it, there is a simple answer for Democratic presidential contenders: “I’m focused on the future and fixing the damage from Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency.” Biden’s health is an interesting issue from a historical standpoint — and as I noted the other day, an issue worth addressing in the context of those around Biden who perhaps kept the public in the dark. But as for its long-term political impact? It’s a non-story.

What Going On

• Last week, I wrote about Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a 19-year-old undocumented immigrant arrested after a traffic stop in Dalton, Georgia, and then turned over to ICE. Ximena has lived in the US since the age of 4. She speaks with a Southern twang, has no memory of her home country of Mexico, but if the Trump administration gets its way, she will soon be deported.

• Adding insult to injury, the police in Dalton now say Ximena should not have been pulled over.

• The level of corruption inside the Trump administration is simply off the charts.

• In case you didn’t think Florida could get any dumber …

• Democrats won another special election. This time, they flipped the Mayor’s office in Omaha, Nebraska. This could be a big problem for GOP Rep. Don Bacon, who represents the city in Congress and is already highly vulnerable.

Musical Interlude