The self inflicted Joe Biden tragedy

decades for any legacy

Lyndon Johnson's great grandchildren are learning about his extraordinary achievements, sweeping voting rights bill, Medicare, Medicaid, as well as his tragic Vietnam War blunder.
That's likely what Joe Biden's great grandchildren will experience, balancing his impressive achievements, if not as enduring as LBJ's, along with catastrophically paving the way for Donald Trump 2.0.
But, like LBJ, that balance is going to take a long time, decades.

The tragedy of Biden's insistence on running for reelection despite his age and slipping mental acuity is captured in three new books: Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple; and Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
They provide interesting anecdotes and will be helpful to historians. The larger picture we knew: In his 80s, Biden's age was showing as he slipped mentally and should have kept his pledge to be a bridge, only serving four years.
(This is written with the sad news Biden has an aggressive prostrate cancer. I doubt this was evident a year ago, but underscores the health risks of age.)
These books were meticulously reported. The best sources are obvious, common to most journalism, though there are too many anonymous quotes and one named source in the Whipple book is troubling: Paul Manafort, a convicted felon and congenital liar.
I am not a Monday morning quarterback, as both in columns and a weekly podcast, I argued Biden was too old and should get out. Alas, few paid much attention.
But they paid attention to my podcast partner, James Carville, who railed against Biden's candidacy far more than the five authors of these three books combined. A Biden campaign staffer once asked if I could control Carville? Sure, right after I controlled a tornado.
I was convinced Biden couldn't win in 2023 by focusing on three states: Pennsylvania, Biden's birth state which he won by 80,000 in 2020; North Carolina, which he narrowly lost but Democrats thought with Republicans running crazy fringe statewide candidates there could be reverse coattails; and Wisconsin, where the last two victors (Trump in 2016) and Biden (2020) won by less than 1%.
By late fall that year, smart Democratic sources doubted Biden would carry Pennsylvania or North Carolina. In Wisconsin, Ben Wikler, the Democratic party chair, thought it would be tight. Other sources in those states said they encountered a few 2020 Biden voters who were switching to Trump but almost none going the other way.
If right, Biden had no realistic path to 270 electoral votes.

Also, any improbable second Biden term would be a nightmare. Successful Presidents -- think Reagan, Clinton, Obama -- are able to articulate their policies and vision.
Biden was a terrible communicator which was getting worse with age. For all the talk about the Democrats' woes on inflation, imagine if under the very same economy -- Jamie Dimon called it the best in the history of the world -- with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama running. They would have beaten Trump like a drum.
By waiting until a month before the convention, Biden made Kamala Harris's job even harder. With an impressive bench of Governors, there were better Democratic candidates -- "The Philadelphia Eagles wouldn't have won the Super Bowl with their fourth string quarterback," Carville quipped-- but it was too late.
Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg, in an insightful piece that traced his disturbing conversations with the Biden high command throughout 2023, argued that Harris might have won if she had struck some distance from Biden. She should have done that more directly at the August convention. She didn't.
Much more relevant than George Clooney, a great actor, writing about Biden's condition in mid-2024 is the earlier cowardice of Democratic office holders. Those politicians miscalculated that challenging Biden would only help Trump.
House Republicans will try to make the case that Biden's condition endangered the country. While detailing his frightening cognitive decline, none of these books cite a specific case of causing a policy crisis. The worst foreign policy disaster, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, was in Biden's first year.

In 2022 and 2023 the Biden Administration is credited with skillful handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That may reflect the highly capable national security team, including National Security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA director Bill Burns. But any GOP witch hunt on this score won't be credible.
With the age issue I thought back to 1984 when as the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau chief, I told my boss, managing editor Norman Pearlstine, we wanted to do a story on Ronald Reagan's age; he was 73 and showed signs of decline. Pearlstine said it should be tied to an incident like an illness or a fall.
In the first Presidential debate against Democrat Walter Mondale, a month before the election, Reagan got lost and looked like he was mentally wandering down the Pacific Coast Highway. I called Norman and we ran a front page story the next day.
There was a second debate and Reagan, whatever his actual cognitive condition, more than rose to the occasion and ended talk of age.
Joe Biden couldn't have done that.