HOW IT STARTED: Washington Post endorses Joe Biden for president.
In order to expel the worst president of modern times, many voters might be willing to vote for almost anybody.
Fortunately, to oust President Trump in 2020, voters do not have to lower their standards. The Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, is exceptionally well-qualified, by character and experience, to meet the daunting challenges that the nation will face over the coming four years.
Those challenges have been, to varying degrees, created, exacerbated or neglected by the incumbent: the covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed more lives in this country than anywhere else in the world; rising inequality and racial disparities; a 21st-century, high-tech authoritarianism ascendant in the world, with democracy in retreat; a planet at risk due to human-caused climate change.
—The WaPo Editorial Board, September 28th, 2020.
How it’s going: Was Biden too frail for the job? Voters should have been informed.
It now seems that, for a considerable time, Biden might have lacked the stamina and cognitive capacity the job demands — and that his family and closest aides concealed this from the public. Their apparent decision to put personal loyalties ahead of their duty to the country must be reckoned with. A legal mechanism should be considered to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
The people closest to Biden could hardly have avoided observing his infirmity — indeed, the actions they took to hide it indicate that they knew all too well. Early issues surfaced in the 2020 campaign, when he had memory lapses, including forgetting the name of one of his closest advisers and the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence. A Democrat interviewed by Tapper and Thompson who was involved in making Zoom videos of Biden speaking to constituents during the pandemic lockdown said that, after watching hours of mostly unusable footage, they concluded he was incapable of doing the job.
Such observations then became more frequent. “Since at least 2022,” Tapper and Thompson write, “he has had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day. He can sometimes seem incoherent. He is increasingly prone to losing his train of thought.”
“By late 2023,” the authors say, “Biden’s staff was pushing as much of his schedule as possible to midday, when Biden was at his best.” Even in small groups, the president often read from notes or a teleprompter.
This suggests that Biden might have been too impaired to responsibly lead the United States. The country was fortunate not to have experienced a late-night crisis that he would have had trouble handling. It would be folly to count on such luck in the future.
The situation might have been prevented had the president and his team been open with the public about his condition. Transparency is a crucial element in the political marketplace. If Biden had admitted his difficulties and stepped out of the running for the 2024 election, the Democratic Party would have been able to select a stronger candidate via competitive primaries. This is the way the system is designed to work. Covering up reality undermines it.
—The WaPo Editorial Board, today.
If only the WaPo had journalists who, oh, I don’t know, could report on the president’s ongoing health, not least of which through the power of observation. And was a newspaper that made its bones on aggressively reporting on a presidential administration’s various scandals. And whose emo motto for the past 8 years has been “Democracy dies in darkness.”