Ramesh Ponnuru writes for National Review Online about recent revelations involving former President Joe Biden.
There is a tension at the heart of Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book about “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” At the end of the authors’ note that opens the book, they promise that they will tell the story that “was in front of our noses.” But how can anyone cover up what’s on full display? And who were the victims of this cover-up? By late 2021, less than a year into Joe Biden’s term, most Americans already thought he was too old for the job.
But there is a difference between concluding that, as a matter of common sense, having an octogenarian president is risky; seeing public appearances in which Biden was clearly past his peak performance; inferring that he was probably having worse days when the public wasn’t seeing him; and knowing that he sometimes forgot the names of people who had worked closely with him for decades. It’s that last type of datum that the public didn’t have — and, Tapper and Thompson show in detail, that Biden’s associates kept from us. …
… Everyone who gets to the White House has proven himself fantastically lucky. That makes it all the more important for the winner to ensure that someone nearby is willing to puncture his fantasies. Biden, his family, and his team instead sought to punish anyone who made the obvious observations about his decline. …
… Even now, some Democrats are coming up with rationales for looking away. Why look backward at Biden when President Trump is on a rampage, they ask. Yet the worse Trump is, the more important it is for his opponents to figure out why he won. The answer is not just that Biden made a series of discrete errors, such as picking a politically unattractive vice president and clinging to power too long. It’s also that the Democratic Party, at its very top, routinely demonstrated that it did not trust the public and did not deserve trust itself.
