Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
The lines are from A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Joe Biden is not an athlete dying young. He is a president, leaving old, at a shockingly late moment in the drama of the year 2024, just weeks before the Democratic convention. He should have slipped away a few years ago.
About the dead, one must speak nothing but good. About Joe Biden in his withdrawal from the presidential race, commentators for now are saying nothing except that it was a difficult, poignant, and self-sacrificing deed, touched by nobility. His bombshell on a Sunday afternoon in July broke an unbearable tension in what used to be called the public mind—a tension compounded, week after week, by footage of the president walking stiffly, staring blankly, fumbling his words, and staggering as he ascended the short stairs onto Air Force One. His June 27 debate with Donald Trump was excruciating to watch. So it was that the announcement of his departure—not merely from the 2024 race but from a long and complicated public life—produced a kind of dazed relief. The first reactions were generous and grateful. And yet there was a note of nil nisi hokum in the air.
It’s said that no president can be properly judged until 30 years have elapsed from the time he left office. By that rule, Joe Biden cannot be correctly evaluated until 2054 or thereabouts.
For the moment, it would be well to remember that the incredible mess of American politics in the summer of 2024 is the doing not only of the egregious Donald Trump but also of a stubborn, prideful, selfish Joe Biden and his wife Jill and the rest of the Bidens, and his closest aides. In this debacle, Biden’s laurels are withered; he does not deserve much glory. In the wake of his reluctant departure from the race, he leaves a squalor of conspiracy theories and the scandal of his having persisted for so long. Conservative historians will write him off as an incompetent, while progressives—after overpraising his accomplishments—will recall him as the one who left the Democratic Party in chaos and, as may be, delivered the country to the carnivore Donald Trump.
Whatever the achievements or disasters of Biden’s administration, he will be condemned for his profound irresponsibility in placing his party and his country in jeopardy. The first reactions to his capitulation make it sound heroic. The truth is that the man does not know how to make a graceful exit—whether from Afghanistan or from a presidential race.
The verdict will be harsh on his wife Jill and his closest advisers and his doctors because for so long they concealed his deepening disability. Laws will be written—or should be—making it a crime to hide the truth of a president’s physical and mental condition from the American people.
The drama has had a Shakespearean vanity: the story of a fairly ordinary man, who, for all of his long career, has been somewhat out of his depth but nonetheless succeeded handsomely enough as a politician, trading on his flashing Irish grin, his communion breakfast blarney (“Joey, my dad said to me . . . ”), his occasionally plagiarized rhetoric, and his way of trimming his sails to get the best out of the prevailing winds. Joe Sixpack from Scranton became president in 2021 and swiftly violated the reassuring premise of his campaign (he would be a moderate, transitional president), acquired delusions of grandeur, veered as hard left as the MSNBC crowd could wish, and stayed on that course for the next three and a half years.
That was one betrayal. Another, far worse, emerged from Biden’s pride or self-delusion. With disregard for the welfare of the country and for his obligation to protect it from just the mess the country faces now, he sought a second term. Biden’s judgment has always been bad. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense secretary Robert Gates wrote in a memoir. I remember having dinner in New York with Biden and two or three other journalists in 1988, when he was one of those Democratic presidential candidates known as the “Seven Dwarfs.” I came away from the dinner thinking, “This guy is not very bright.” Shortly afterward, he was forced to withdraw from the race after getting caught appropriating a poignant narrative from the British politician Neil Kinnock about his grandfather being a coal miner.
In his 2020 race against Trump, Biden picked a running mate, Kamala Harris, widely seen as unqualified to sit in the Oval Office. Instead of announcing his retirement at the end of a first term, as he should have, and preparing an orderly succession for Democratic leadership, he persuaded himself of his own indispensability (his immortality, almost)—a quality sharpened by the danger of Harris waiting in the wings.
What the nation saw in the disastrous debate in late June was Biden as Captain Ahab (eyes glazed, thoughts incoherent and spluttering) trying to get a harpoon into the white whale—Donald Trump. Biden’s performance was proof of Charles de Gaulle’s remark that “old age is a shipwreck.”
More than two years ago, I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal, in which (being three years older than Biden), I warned him about his rapidly advancing old age and advised him not to run for a second term. There is no reason why the president of the United States should listen to me. But, as Biden likes to say: Guess what? If he had listened (and just to me), he would have spared the country and himself some of our current travails.
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