JIM GERAGHTY: The Biden Family Tries the Ralph Northam Strategy.

Every now and then, some elected official gets caught in a serious scandal and then attempts to just wait out the storm. Sometimes they hang on because enough time passes between the revelation and their next election; sometimes they hang on because their state or district strongly prefers one party over the other; and often they survive because they’re incumbents who have been around forever, know where all the bodies are buried, and bring home the bacon. Think of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Barney Frank, David Vitter, or Charlie Rangel. Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig rescinded his resignation and finished out his term.

And in my home state, we had the egregious embarrassment of former governor Ralph Northam. As I wrote at the end of Northam’s term:

It’s no big mystery how Northam remained in office. If Northam had resigned or the state legislature removed him from office, the lieutenant governor would take over – and the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was facing two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus argued that “the allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious,” and also that the state legislature should not investigate the allegations.) If Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state attorney general Mark Herring would be governor — and Herring admitted he had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.

If Northam, Fairfax, and Herring had all resigned simultaneously, then the speaker of the House of Delegates at that time — Republican Kirk Cox — would become governor. And Virginia Democrats believed that a Republican governor was much worse than blackface, wearing a Klan hood, or allegations of past sexual assault.

We are witnessing the Biden inner-circle attempt the Ralph Northam maneuver. Sure, the president had an abysmal debate, didn’t do a sit-down on-camera interview until a week later, and his staff is telling radio interviewers what questions to ask. But Biden has all the delegates he needs to stay the party’s nominee in 2024, and it’s exceptionally difficult to remove a president who doesn’t want to leave office. Eric Felten contended in the Wall Street Journal last week that the current circumstances are proving that the 25th Amendment “is practically useless when a president is incapacitated and won’t admit it. . . . Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the president and serve at his pleasure. What politician is going to kick to the curb the man who gave him his high office?”

Ralph Northam was a Democrat governor, whose party, as Geraghty wrote above, decided was the least worst choice of all their options. So it was relatively easy for his state’s media to simply go to ground shortly after the scandal around him broke. The implications of a single state’s media being in the tank for him weren’t as noticeable to the general public as the blob of journalists who cover Capitol Hill. Or as Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.

Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.

Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.

So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.

Earlier: “Gradually, then suddenly.”