Biden was badly failed by his inner circle

Over the summer I read Original Sin, a book about Joe Biden’s decline and his decision to run again for US President. We all know how that worked out, but the details in the book make for a grim - if very interesting - story.

The book was written by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It sets out the story of how President Biden experienced a major physical and cognitive decline during his presidency, and argues that it was hidden - even covered up - by those closest to him.

As we all know, that process unravelled on June 27th, 2024, when President Biden debated with Republican nominee Donald Trump. Biden’s performance was so bad, his delivery so halting and his pauses and gazing into the distance so concerning, that he eventually - after a very few weeks - had to withdraw from the race.

Much of the focus of the book is on how Biden’s decline was hidden by a small enough number of people closest to him. The book describes how, in the second half of his Presidency particularly, the President met fewer people. Many senior people who would have seen him frequently at the start of his presidency only saw him rarely in the latter half of it. It describes how, so concerning was his general articulation, that he had to use a teleprompter when he spoke at even casual events, and was generally being shielded from occasions where he would have to engage in back and forth with people.

This, the book argues, amounted to a cover-up of how much he had declined. There is also a lot about how many White House staff and senior Democratic politicians felt that they had been misled about the extent of the problem.

That argument caused me to wonder, though, how something could be apparent to everyone worldwide, but not to people much closer to him than any of us. Well before that debate in 2024, it was absolutely clear that President Biden was no longer the man he had been, either physically and cognitively, and it was not a small thing. You just had to switch on your television or your phone and it was absolutely obvious.

It gained a hard focus early in 2024, more than four months before the disastrous debate with Trump. President Biden was being investigated in respect of some documents he took with him while leaving office as Vice President back in 2017. An independent special prosecutor, Robert Hur, was appointed to look into it and make a decision as to whether the President should be prosecuted or not.

In February 2024, he concluded that he could not recommend prosecuting the President. But, in the report submitted to explain his decision, Hur argued that Biden would be impossible to prosecute because a jury would find him a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”. 

Now at the time many attacked Hur for the use of that line. Many felt - or at least said out loud - that it was political. But did anyone who watched President Biden at the time not worry that the line reflected the truth? It required no great insight to spot that, or at least to see the worry. 

A few weeks after the Hur report, on February 20th, I wrote in this newspaper that it might well be that Biden would not run. That wasn’t a particularly insightful or novel observation. It was just simply obvious from looking at the man. And what Original Sin makes clear is that American voters - on all sides - understood this very well. Voters were telling pollsters that he was too old to run and that they did not consider this a debatable point. When I saw the debate with Trump in June 2024, my presumption was that someone in Biden’s circle had engineered an early debate, knowing that it would be so bad that it would force a decision on him to withdraw before it was too late. As it did.

No evidence of that as a strategy has emerged - yet anyway. So what on earth did happen?

The book makes a great deal of how President Biden and those closest to him made a big - historic - mistake in choosing to run a second time. But a politician not knowing that his day is done is not an especially unusual event, however consequential it was in this case.

The much more interesting question is why and how did senior Democrats not try to get him off the pitch earlier? There are points that can be made in their defence about that: that the President of the United States is an incredibly powerful person, and you don’t tangle with him without peril.

The main explanation seems to be that Donald Trump had to be beaten, and that Biden was the only one who had done it before. Some thought that therefore they had to stick with him. Some no doubt thought that if they challenged the President they would be cut out of his circle, and it would only lead to divisiveness and a definite Democratic defeat by Trump, with the additional danger that they would get the blame. Some who said nothing also thought that if Biden did not run, the candidate to replace him would be the Vice President, Kamala Harris. It was widely felt that, given her unpopular positions on many issues, and her closeness to Biden, there was no way she would beat Trump.

To make matters worse, once the damage was done and Biden had to withdraw, the Democrats decided that the Vice President should run without any contest. One reason for that was the fear that if she was not the candidate, it would reduce turnout among African-Americans in key congressional districts, and that in turn might cause many Democrats to lose their seats in Congress. But by not contesting her, they made her a weaker candidate - a point Barack Obama understood. Had she won a bitter floor fight at the Democratic Convention, she would have been enhanced by that tough victory and had a better chance in the November election. As it turned out, and with virtually no time to prepare, she performed admirably as a candidate.

There were lots of reasons, then, how we ended up where we did, but it seems somewhat implausible that senior Democrats, seasoned politicians and operatives, were duped into believing something the rest of us understood all too well.

The fallout from all of it is enormous. Apart from the obvious - President Trump - the main one is this: the Democrats have spent years telling people that Trump and the Republicans engage in fake news. They talk about alternative realities and disinformation. But the Democratic Party told people - again and again - that there was nothing to see about the health and well-being of the President of the United States when it was really obvious that there was. That will hurt the next time the Democrats try to call something out, as the other side will say ‘hey, these are the guys who tried to tell you Joe Biden could run again’. 

Joe Biden was a great man and achieved many fine things as President in his first term. He was - and is - a great friend to Ireland and indeed to Ballina. He should never have thought about running again. But that isn’t all on him. There are plenty in the Democratic Party who need to reflect on the price of deciding not to tell him earlier that he couldn’t.