Democrats Are Shocked, Shocked that Their Candidate Stayed True to Form

The red flags were there all along.

President Biden was not fit to run for another four years in the world’s toughest job. He slurred his words. He mumbled incoherently. A special probe that cleared him of criminal charges noted that he was “elderly and forgetful.”

The nation agreed. In a recent poll, 77 percent of the public, including 69 percent of Democrats, said Biden is just too old to be effective for four more years.

“Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves,” Ezra Klein wrote in The New York Times.

It’s not as if his aides couldn’t see what everyone was seeing. Nevertheless, they tried to hide and minimize and spin our heads to convince us all was good with Scranton Joe. So instead of gracefully replacing him, Democratic honchos with the implicit support of the mainstream media chose to close their eyes and hope for the best.

Surprise, surprise: In the wake of Biden’s stumbling debate performance Thursday night, now they’re panicking.

What were they expecting?

When even CNN describes it as an “unmitigated disaster” for Biden, and The New York Times calls it a “shaky, halting debate performance [that] has top Democrats talking about replacing him on the ticket,” you know we’ve reached a low point.

It was a low point that could have been avoided.

Biden was never supposed to be a two-term president. As Mark Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic, “Biden had promised voters in 2020 that he was ‘a bridge,’ and nothing more: As a vehicle to end Trump’s time in the White House, Biden presented a stability candidate who could ease the transition to a new political era without the aging Trump — and without the also aging Biden.”

Now, he may go down in history as the man who brought Donald Trump back to the White House.

What was especially dismaying about the debate is that Biden’s poor performance took attention away from Trump’s lies, bluster and evasiveness, as well as the issues themselves. Most of the conversation is now about the fallout from Biden’s “unmitigated disaster” and whether it’s too late for Democrats to do something about it.

Democrats who allowed it to get this far have only themselves to blame. They knew what we all knew. Perhaps they were hoping against hope that Biden could pull off another miracle and slay the dreaded Orange Man, that he had some special superpower to do so. But whatever else they were thinking, they aggressively downplayed the president’s declining fitness for office and are now paying the price for a high-stakes gamble that backfired.

Biden himself is hardly blameless. If he’s not aware of his declining state, I feel sorry for him. But if he is aware and still chose to run for another four years as leader of the free world, I can only cringe at that level of self-absorption.

As Mark Antonio Wright starkly noted in NRO, “There’s only one thing to say about Thursday night’s debate: Joe Biden’s selfishness, stubbornness, ambition, and pride have made it very likely that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.”

There’s a concept in academia called “Awareness of age-related change (AARC),” that describes “all those experiences that make a person aware that his or her behavior, level of performance, or ways of experiencing his or her life have changed as a consequence of having grown older.”

Maybe Biden’s declining state has made it harder for him to recognize that decline; maybe it’s too difficult or painful for him to accept the effects of aging on his performance. But it’s one thing for the president to be in denial. It’s quite another for all those around him who knew better and are now panicking.

For them, this deliberate denial is unforgivable.