By Bret Stephens / The New York Times
Wishful thinking, to adapt a phrase, is a helluva drug.
In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, his well-wishers are claiming that it was just an off night. “Bad debate nights happen,” wrote Barack Obama in a social media post that’s garnered more than 100 million views. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and a major Democratic donor, wrote that when Biden “does poorly, he tends to bounce back; and then win.” Biden himself told a gathering of East Hampton, N.Y., donors that “I didn’t have a great night, but neither did Trump.”
Pure nonsense.
It’s true that Obama had a bad first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, just as Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 — and both men went on to win resounding reelections. It’s also true that Trump’s performance — by turns bombastic, evasive, mendacious and meandering — would have been seen as embarrassing against nearly any other opponent.
But Biden was his opponent, and the transparent problem with the president’s performance wasn’t that he debated poorly. It’s that he is suffering from serious cognitive decline, something from which there is no coming back. I don’t say this as a medical expert, only as one of many millions of people who have witnessed, in elderly people we love, the same symptoms we saw in Biden on Thursday: the garbled thoughts and slurred words and unfinished sentences; the vacant stare; the confusion.
As a human matter, this is heartbreaking. As a political one, it’s disqualifying. Biden is asking voters for four more years to “finish the job.” Given recent reports in The Wall Street Journal about the speed of his deterioration, that’s a promise he’d be unlikely to keep even if he somehow wins the election.
All this has been increasingly obvious for years; and some of us have repeatedly said so. But this is also a time to ask questions of those who saw the president and insisted there was nothing seriously amiss, or that his verbal stumbles were just a function of his stutter, or that his voice may be soft but his thoughts are clear. Were they clueless? Dishonest? Choosing to not see?
Whichever way, they bear some of the blame for trying to prop up a mentally unwell incumbent in order to stop a morally unfit challenger. To those who love the president, starting with his wife, it’s time to tell him: for God’s sake, and the country’s, and his own; don’t run.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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