The case for Biden 2024 is weaker today than it was immediately after the first presidential debate.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Democrats implored their standard-bearer to prove that he had merely “had a bad night”: He could prove his mental acuity, rhetorical competence, and vitality through a blitz of live television appearances and press conferences. And he could demonstrate his cognitive and neurological health by submitting to clinical testing and then releasing the results to the public.
Instead, the president conducted two secretlypre-scripted radio interviews, and then sat for a single, 22-minute television Q&A — after taking a week to prepare — and still repeatedly failed to articulate coherent thoughts. In one of his clearest answers, however, Biden conveyed his adamant refusal to undergo cognitive and neurological testing.
Biden followed this up with a call-in interview to MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday. During that appearance, the president seemed to be reading off of written notes — and still sometimes failed to complete his own sentences, trailing off after losing the thread of a talking point about Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, a wide array of Democrats and foreign officials have told reporters that Biden’s debate performance wasn’t an anomaly: The president has repeatedly suffered similarly disquieting mental lapses in private. Democratic donors revealed that Biden bizarrely relied on a teleprompter to deliver remarks in the private home of a patron.
Voters appear similarly unnerved. In multiple polls, upward of 70 percent of Americans say Biden is not fit for a second term. And Trump’s lead over the president has grown both nationally and in battleground states — despite the fact that Biden is drastically outspending his opponent on TV ads, an advantage that will soon disappear as the Republican begins tapping his own formidable campaign funds.
In light of all this, the president’s die-hard supporters have been forced to lean on a variety of unsound arguments for his candidacy. I refuted several of these in a column last week. But a new one gained prominence over the weekend, which can be summarized as, “History teaches us that changing nominees this late in the race is electoral suicide.”
