If Biden is senile, why is he kicking so much Republican ass?

They can't have it both ways.

Biden on the South Lawn in January. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

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Friday, the top five stories on the New York Times homepage were about President Joe Biden’s memory, and it only got worse over the days that followed.

Source: twitter

Popular Information provided a breakdown showing that the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Times collectively published 81 articles over the weekend about Biden’s age. This was the inevitable result of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s drive-by smear in a report that otherwise cleared the president of any wrongdoing regarding how he handled classified documents, in marked contrast to Donald Trump.

Hur’s report questioned Biden’s overall mental fitness. He condescendingly described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur is a prosecutor, not a trained neurologist who specializes in memory loss and dementia. In a courtroom drama, most of what he wrote would be dismissed as prejudicial and irrelevant. But this didn’t stop Republicans and news outlets from treating Hur’s gratuitous observations as an official medical document.

CNN also devoted significant air time to Biden’s mental faculties, often comparing his age to Trump’s multiple felony indictments. That’s precisely the false equivalency Republicans crave.

“Can Biden dig himself out?” a CNN panel wondered. No, Biden cannot stop aging, and unfortunately the mainstream media won’t stop treating normal age-related issues as serious impairments and conclusive evidence of cognitive decline.

Biden is 81. He doesn’t deny it and it would be ridiculous if he tried. However, his likely general election opponent is just a few years younger and has memory issues of his own: He recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, mistakenly said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is the leader of Turkey, and falsely claims he won the 2020 presidential election — a demonstrated level of delusion commonly found among people who insist they’re Napoleon.

The media is stuck in its own Ouroboros loop — producing stories about Biden’s age that respond to their own often questionable polling that produces responses likely driven by the glut of stories about Biden’s age. It’s exhausting and ignores the actual stakes of the 2024 election, where both candidates are over 75 and only one is objectively unfit to serve.

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It’s not unreasonable for voters to have concerns about Biden’s age. He’ll be 86 at the end of his second term, and it’s fair to wonder whether someone that age is up for the job. There’s still debate about whether former President Ronald Reagan began exhibiting Alzheimer’s symptoms while in office, but White House aides in 1986 thought Reagan was so “depressed, inept and inattentive” they seriously considered invoking the 25th Amendment. More recently, Sen. Dianne Feinstein demonstrated alarming and obvious signs of cognitive decline prior to her death last year.

But in Biden’s case, the media is amplifying disinformation rather than providing journalistic clarity. It’s not as if Biden simply isn’t as capable overall as he was 15 years ago, when he was a spritely 66. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has attacked both Biden and Trump’s mental fitness, but she wrongly conflates age with performance. Trump has always been an unstable bigot, and prior to his presidency, Biden was famous for his frequent gaffes. There were even websites that detailed so-called “Biden-isms.”

Biden-isms aren’t new

While filing the paperwork in 2007 for his second failed presidential run, Biden made a racially tone-deaf comment about fellow candidate Barack Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.” This was obviously not how he wanted to lead a news cycle after launching his candidacy.

There were other incidents of what the media diagnosed as Biden’s “foot in mouth” disease. He told donors at a private fundraiser just a few weeks before the 2008 presidential election that there would be an “international crisis, a generated crisis” in the first few months of an Obama presidency that would “test the mettle of this guy.” John McCain’s campaign leapt on Biden’s remarks, and the Obama team scrambled to play clean up.

This was a common theme, sort of like the running gag in a political sitcom. The New York Times described Biden in 2008 as a “distinctive blend of pit bull and odd duck" with “weak filters” that made him blurt out “out-of-nowhere comments” and “goofy asides.” The gaffes were usually minor and amusing — describing the Affordable Care Act as a “big fucking deal” or publicly mourning the Irish Prime Minister’s mother who was still very much alive (see video below) — but occasionally, they were politically perilous.

Biden revealed to House Democrats at their 2009 caucus retreat candid White House discussions about the $900 billion economic-stimulus package and how Democrats could face major political blowback in the upcoming midterm elections. Obama later joked, "I don't remember exactly what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly."

Then there was Biden’s 2009 appearance on the Today show when his response to a swine flu outbreak seemed to border on outright panic.

"I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places right now,” he said. “It's not that it's going to Mexico, it's that you are in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes everywhere through the aircraft. That's me."

This infuriated the airline industry, and once again the White House need to smooth over Biden’s remarks. It wasn’t surprising that many Democrats believed Hillary Clinton was a more reliable heir apparent to Obama. (The Washington Post had even asked prior to the 2012 election if Biden was a “liability for Obama.”) However, no one ever suggested Biden was senile. He was perceived more like your wacky uncle after his second beer — good for a laugh but perhaps not the ideal political candidate.

After Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign, The Guardian observed that over his “decades-long career in politics, he has cultivated a reputation of being gaffe-prone, often stumbling on his words — if not outright saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.” What’s revealing is that the article never makes Biden’s age the issue, and he was already 76. There’s no idle speculation about whether he’s losing a step or outright sundowning. This wasn’t an oversight. If Bill Clinton or Barack Obama suddenly lost their rhetorical mastery, we might assume a possible cognitive decline, but Biden never boasted a reputation as a great communicator or savvy political operator.

Biden has if anything toned done the gaffes with age

In 2015, CNN questioned a potential Biden candidacy after a series of public gaffes. During former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s swearing in, Biden held his wife Stephanie’s shoulders and whispered into her ear.

This became another embarrassing viral moment that dogged Biden during his 2020 campaign. However, it’s vanished as a major issue today. Biden, responding to feedback, released a video in 2019 where he apologized for his past handiness and promised to “much more mindful” of personal space. He adjusted his behavior and has had no issues of this sort since. That is not typical of a confused elderly person who’s mentally slipping.

Yes, Biden has a habit of Paul Bunyan-esque tall tales about his life, including vastly overstating his personal involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, but that’s not a recent development. He’s done this for almost 40 years, and there’s no evidence that it’s worsening or that he’s become disconnected from reality. A character quirk shouldn’t trigger the 25th Amendment.

Just like their sham impeachment efforts, Republicans have no actual evidence that Biden’s senile and incompetent. They sound alarms over Biden confusing world leaders with their dead predecessors, but flubs like this are fairly common among past presidents, regardless of age.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama said he’d visited “57 states.” This was obviously a slip of the tongue and a not a sign of early onset dementia. Trump, however, has recently suggested Obama is still president multiple times, to the point where he’s had to try to explain it away by claiming he was being sarcastic. But the sarcasm defense wouldn’t explain Trump in 2019 claiming the Continental Army “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War. That he blamed on the telepromter.

Their cheap smears are all the more transparent when Republicans frequently complain that their own leaders keep losing to Biden. Back in 2013, when negotiating the debt limit, Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid sidelined Biden because he believed he’d given away the farm in past deals with Republicans. But a decade later, during a MAGA-manufactured debt ceiling crisis, Biden ran circles around then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — to the extent that GOP Rep. Nancy Mace complained, “Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.”

True to form, McCarthy still maintains the GOP line that Biden’s checked out and can only “talk through cards.” (The president consults detailed notes. He’s not reading from a prepared script.) This is a sharp contrast to Biden’s predecessor, who rarely read intelligence briefings and racked up a series of major negotiating failures. Biden’s significant legislative achievements with a razor-thin House and Senate majority should negate any charges that this captain is sick at sea.

The Biden administration has run far more smoothly than one might’ve expected from the Joe Biden who once provided reliable fodder for late night comedy monologues. It wasn’t long before journalists privately and publicly complained that Biden was simply dull — arguably what the media finds more offensive than his advanced age. Politico complained in 2022 that Biden had “over-delivered” on boredom and that this carried “a political cost in a Permanent Washington that, for better or worse, thrills to displays of executive-branch social fireworks.”

Those “fireworks” are more fun for the press to cover than a quietly competent presidential administration. It’s as if they would prefer the Onion parody Biden.

Republicans, meanwhile, are set to nominate a lawless insurrectionist for president. It’s in their best interest to convince voters that a second Biden term is somehow just as risky as another Trump one. It’s why they latched onto his age — something he obviously can’t change — but rather than promoting their narrative, the media might consider focusing on Biden’s actual performance as president.

Along with his legislative victories, Biden has exercised diplomatic skill regarding the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. There have been no panicky interviews on morning TV or off-the-cuff hot mic remarks that derailed careful negotiations and sparked international crises. In short, Biden is a better chief executive than Trump, whose administration was well-documented chaos.

Biden apparently suffers from the rare form of dementia that makes him more focused and disciplined as president than he ever was as vice president. This is the story the media should pursue, if they followed facts and ignored “vibes.”

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That’s it for today

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