OPINION:
President Biden last week announced he will seek reelection in 2024.
So did his massive throng of thousands of supporters cheer at the packed-to-the-gills event? No. Basement Hidin’ Biden did it on a video (so needless to say, he didn’t take questions).
The announcement came as a new NBC News poll found 70% of Americans, including 51% of Democrats, think Mr. Biden, 80, shouldn’t run for reelection. Just 26% support the president, who would be 86 years old at the end of his second term should he win.
One Republican presidential candidate thinks his reelection bid is tantamount to elder abuse — and claims that Mr. Biden isn’t really running the show anyway.
“It’s a myth that Joe Biden is actually running for president. He’s not,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said on Fox News. “It’s just the managerial class using Joe Biden as a front to advance its own agenda. To them, Biden’s cognitive impairment isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.”
“This is how the managerial class crushes everyday citizens — not with a bang, but with a whimper,” he said.
Mr. Ramaswamy, who is 37, was harsh, calling Mr. Biden a “hollowed-out husk.”
“The administrative state more effectively controls its puppets when they are hollowed-out husks of themselves. The fact that it’s elder abuse is just a cost of doing business for Biden’s handlers. It’s revealing that the DNC [Democratic National Committee] refuses to host primary debates this year; they’re spitting in the face of their grassroots base.”
But having Mr. Biden not run anything is just fine with one New York Times columnist, who says we don’t even need a president.
“Strange as it may sound, the American government can function without a healthy president,” David Leonhardt wrote in a newsletter last week.
Mr. Leonhardt said Mr. Biden is much like President Franklin Roosevelt was during World War II. But like so much of the reporting in the Times, that’s wrong. FDR was mentally sharp as a tack throughout his tenure in the White House; for the record, he was 20 years younger than Mr. Biden at the height of WWII.
The writer also compared Mr. Biden to former President Ronald Reagan, who — years after leaving the White House — announced he had Alzheimer’s disease.
“In each case, White House aides, Cabinet secretaries and military leaders performed well despite the lack of a fully engaged leader,” Mr. Leonhardt wrote. Uh, Roosevelt wasn’t engaged? Nor Reagan?
Now, let’s be clear: We’ve never had a president so out of it in the history of this country. We could list a thousand examples, but just one is needed — the most recent.
Mr. Biden popped by a gathering of parents and children on Take Your Children to Work Day last week. One child at the White House event asked the president, “What was the last country you traveled to?”
Now, you likely know that just a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Biden went to Ireland, where he told a bunch of made-up stories about his Irish heritage. But here’s what he told that child.
“The last country I’ve traveled — I’m trying to think the last one I was in — I, I’ve been to 89 — I’ve met with 89 heads of state so far, so, uh — I’m trying to think. What was the last — Where was the last place I was? It’s hard to keep track. Um, I was — ” Mr. Biden said.
“Ireland!” another child yelled in reply.
“Yeah, you’re right, Ireland,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s where it was. How’d you know that?”
Because that child’s got a working brain, Mr. President.
There are still 553 days until Election Day 2024, but right now, things look pretty bleak for Mr. Biden. Shortly after Mr. Biden announced his reelection campaign, his job approval rating among the U.S. public slipped to 37%, Gallup reports. That’s just slightly more than 1 in 3 people — not a winning number. In the 2020 election, Mr. Biden won 51.3% of the vote, so that’s a 14.3% drop in support.
And for the record, 37% is the lowest Gallup has measured for him to date.
For The New York Times, however, a brain-dead president is just fine.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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