The former president remains in a total state of denial.
The last thing the reeling Democratic Party needed was the re-emergence of the man most responsible for its fall from grace. And when the enfeebled Joe Biden came out of hiding in recent days to criticize President Trump – and presumably to generate sales for his memoirs – Republicans quietly cheered while Democrats openly cringed. Even the left-wing ladies of The View could not prop up the old man, especially when, as with his last cabinet meeting as president, he needed his wife to step in and answer elementary questions.
To say Biden’s fellow Democrats, most of them hoping he would stay away and never come back, are furious would be an understatement. As Donald Trump reminds people every day of why he was elected with the most energetic, broad-ranging, and game-changing presidency in memory, the site of the addled Joe Biden rearing his head once more was like fingernails on a chalkboard for leftists far and wide. Especially when they have yet to figure out a way to recover from the Biden-Harris disaster that left the party in shambles.
One of the more honest yet relatively strained responses to Biden’s recent appearances on The View and BBC was by Democratic strategist Anthony Coley, who worked in the Biden administration. “Elections are about the future. Every time Joe Biden emerges, we fight an old war,” Coley told The Hill. “Every interview he does provides a contrast to Trump that’s just not helpful for the Democratic brand, which needs trusted messengers and fighters who can reach independents and moderates and inspire the base. Joe Biden ain’t that.”
Other leftist pundits were less charitable. “I think that every Democratic politician, particularly those who want to lead the party and want to run in 2028, have to just rip the f—ing Band-Aid off,” said Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau
Sorry Not Sorry
Though Biden nominally accepted responsibility for the election outcome, he denied his transparent cognitive decline, saying, “They are wrong … There’s nothing to sustain that,” and refused to acknowledge the obvious, which almost everyone else has long known – that he never should have run for re-election in the first place. He is still in denial, saying: “the only reason I got out of the race was because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party,” insisting he would have beaten Trump for a second time if he stayed in the race. Dan Pfeiffer, aide to Barack Obama, said on the Pod Save America podcast: “I find it very aggravating and, frankly, infuriating when he says that he thinks he would have won” adding that the idea was “politically insane … it’s like detached from reality.”
As another unnamed Democratic strategist opined, Biden must “take responsibility for his actions” and “own up to the fact that he caused Democrats to lose.” And Democratic strategist Jon Reinish said Biden’s appearance is an unwanted distraction from focusing on younger Democrats “free of baggage and who are finally starting to move the party away from folks who stayed too long at the fair.”
The 46th president could have kicked off his post-presidency and tried to salvage his shattered legacy by discussing his most fond memories over 50 years in Washington and his plans for the future while staying away from political punditry. But instead he reopened gaping wounds while calling Trump’s first three-and-a-half months “the worst 100 days any president’s ever had.” He offered up withering criticism of Trump’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine War, which was particularly galling given that Biden all but green-lighted the war by refusing to react to the massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border shortly after he assumed office and stating that he would not respond to a “minor incursion” by Russia. After restraining himself for the four years of Trump’s first term, Putin could smell Biden’s weakness and launched a full-out war that carries on to this day at the cost of well over one million lives.
Joe and Jill Biden in La-La Land
Four books on the 2024 presidential campaign now in the marketplace have reached a similar conclusion: Biden was in a fog for months, if not years, before he was finally forced to drop out of the race after his catastrophic debate with Trump last June. Yet on The View, Jill Biden denied the veracity of voluminous accounts from officials inside the White House, saying instead that “the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day.” It brings to mind a scene in the movie Christmas Vacation, when Clark Griswold fails to get his elaborate lighting display up and running. When he is ridiculed by his father-in-law, Griswold’s daughter defends her father by saying, “Grandpa, he’s been working very hard,” to which the grandfather responds, “so do washing machines.”
Biden blamed his downfall in part on a hangover from COVID-19, which is particularly rich considering he was elected in the first place largely on the wings of the pandemic that brought Trump low. And he predictably blamed the defeat of Kamala Harris on sexism with a signature word salad: “They went the route of the sexist route.”
Joe Biden’s refusal to leave the presidential race until it was too late, his subsequent denial of the reality of his cognitive decline, and his absurd claim that he would have beaten Donald Trump have only made things worse for a party gasping for air. When his legacy reaches the history books, it will likely center around how dearly he cost his party and destroyed its credibility. It seems that only Joe Biden and his wife fail to grasp that stark reality.
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