President Joe Biden should take his own advice — if only he could remember it.
Biden, as you well know by now, is supposedly the leader of the free world and shouldn’t be. He is a diminished caricature of himself — and was arguably a caricature of a rambling, loose-lipped politician before he was experiencing visible and obvious diminishing cognitive returns — but no one would deny he was in compos mentis, at least for Joe Biden.
Not anymore. This is Biden in a June clip — one that came before his June 27 debate fiasco:
BIDEN (malfunctioning): “…homeland security secretary, uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhhuhuhuh” 😳 pic.twitter.com/7ubWXbDqrf
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 18, 2024
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And that’s one of the more painless clips of a president who, in the past several weeks, has called himself the first black woman commander in chief, said he consults with the commander in chief about military decisions (that would be him), and said he “put NATO together.” (It was put together in 1949.)
If he weren’t running for another four years in the White House, we’d all just laugh this off — if a little uneasily — as he finished his term. But he is running again, we can’t just laugh it off, and how he finds himself facing the same insults he once hurled at Sen. Claiborne Pell.
Pell, a Rhode Island Democrat, is best remembered for the eponymous college grant program he authored. He’s not so fondly remembered for his latter years in the upper chamber, where the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease — which he eventually disclosed he had been diagnosed with — were manifesting themselves.
In a piece for Politico published Wednesday, Tom Galvin — a veteran reporter who’s written for numerous publications and is now a communications strategist — described an incident in the 1990s when Pell’s obvious infirmity, Gavin’s reporting, and Joe Biden intersected.
Should Biden step down?
“One of my annual chores was to attend the president’s State of the Union address. After watching the speech from the House Gallery, my fellow reporters and I would walk one flight of stairs down to Statuary Hall to gather with members of Congress to get their reaction and collect quotes for our stories,” he wrote.
“This practice continues to this day; lawmakers who want to comment to reporters all head to Statuary Hall.
“After one address, I believe in 1994, one of the lawmakers I pigeonholed was Sen. Joe Biden, who was then in his early 50s.
“I’d interviewed him a few times before, but certainly not enough to expect him to lower his guard. We chatted about President Bill Clinton’s speech. And then the topic turned to Biden’s ambition to become chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The then-holder of that office, Claiborne Pell, was in his late 70s and showing signs of the Parkinson’s disease that he’d later disclose.
“I asked Biden if given Pell’s diminished capacity, he’d make a move to replace him. ‘That poor son of a b****,’ Biden replied. Pell was no longer up for the job, he told me, but like so many of his elderly colleagues, Pell couldn’t imagine a life outside Congress.”
Galvin wrote that he was “stunned by Biden’s comments. Not by his analysis of Pell, which was spot on. But what surprised me was Biden’s casual willingness to share candid thoughts with a reporter whom he didn’t know well and had no reason to trust. It was the type of indiscretion that has followed Biden to this day.”
It was also, sadly, the fate that would eventually befall Biden, too, from all appearances.
And it’s the treatment Biden is now getting from Democrats, as influential members of his own party — former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, even former President Barack Obama are turning on him.
We cannot ignore what we can all see — not even, I suspect, President Biden when he looks in the mirror each morning.
I don’t like Biden’s politics. I loathe what he’s done to the country — through policy, through tone, through mendacity and through divisiveness.
I loathe his career trajectory, which has been built upon untruth after untruth and which should be over or stuck in the Senate for whatever years he has left, were it not for Barack Obama needing a pliable, non-threatening vice president, Hillary Clinton’s improbable 2016 loss, and then-House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn’s endorsement before the Democratic primary in Clyburn’s home state of South Carolina in 2020, which saved Biden’s floundering campaign and delivered us from Democratic presidential comrad– err, candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
(And then there was the deux ex machina of the COVID-19 pandemic and the havoc it wreaked on the 2020 election.)
But, as a personal matter, I can echo Biden’s own words all those years ago, if faithfully reported: “That poor son of a b****.” It’s a fate one wishes only on dictators and criminals. But age comes for us all, the sainted and benighted.
Alas, sympathy only goes so far, both for me and for Galvin.
“In his resistance, Biden is not unusual. Many of us have friends, family, or co-workers who had to be told that they could no longer be a surgeon, accountant, therapist, or some other profession. It’s heartbreaking to watch a person lose what they see as their reason for being,” Galvin wrote.
“But that’s where the empathy should end. In the same way a U.S. senator should not serve when he’s in a diminished capacity, a president of the United States cannot be of diminished capacity … It’s time for Biden to leave the stage.”
It was time for that long before now. But as the koan goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. The poor son of a gun needs to admit what we all know.
