It almost seems as if White House strategists want the focus of President Joe Biden’s first full press conference Thursday to be less the substance of governance and more the question of whether Biden is physically up for the job.
They have it set up so that if he does anything more than dodder around and mumble nonsense, the media will play up the presser as a Biden win. But if he does mumble nonsense, some of his minders will still be happy because they will be one step closer to removing Biden’s name from the “Biden-Harris administration.” There’s a sense that when Biden himself referred to his vice president as “President Harris,” he was doing nothing more than giving voice to the inevitable.
This speculation about a president’s fitness is what happens when the new commander in chief takes almost exactly twice as long as any other president in the past 92 years (and three times longer than most) to hold a solo press conference. It is what happens when, time and again, the president makes verbal and physical missteps in public, even though he appears in public far less frequently than most presidents. It is what happens when he often sounds or looks tired or confused and when he spent most of the previous year’s campaign hiding in his basement.
By the way, did you catch that “Biden-Harris administration” verbiage? In a break from all tradition, that is the appellation the White House itself is using. In a stern memo, the White House sent to all federal agencies, that’s what agencies were instructed to call it. Funny, we don’t remember references to the Roosevelt-Nance administration, the Carter-Mondale administration, or the Obama-Biden administration. The repeated emphasis on the understudy is very odd, unless the expectation is that the understudy will soon be taking the lead.
The public deserves and needs a vigorous president. For that reason, presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan, with almost too graphic information about his mild bout of colon cancer, made a point of providing the public with exhaustive information on all but routine matters relating to the chief executive’s health. Former President Donald Trump arguably broke that tradition, but Biden ought to restore it. When a new president is older on his first day in office than any of his 45 predecessors were on their final day, he owes it to the public to reassure them that he is fully fit and functional.
To say so is absolutely not to stoop to the level of a nondoctor’s armchair diagnosis, and thus an ignorant and unfair one, that Biden suffers from some type of dementia. And, in truth, there are times Biden clearly has appeared lucid. Yet, there are all sorts of ways short of dementia that the aging process can make someone less than fully capable. Plenty of elderly people do fine for, say, half a day, but then tire and get a bit “foggy.” There is nothing dishonorable or inherently embarrassing with losing stamina and focus.
Either way, the public has an absolute right to know if something is wrong. Transparency is vital. If a president is ailing or fading in a way not likely to improve, it is wrong to give the impression that he is in charge. It is even worse if a diminished president is being propped up because his “centrist” image provides a patina of reasonableness to policy initiatives that are anything but moderate. If indeed a radical such as Vice President Kamala Harris is being groomed for a midterm promotion to the presidency, the public ought to know.
