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Note: I am (trying) to travel back from sunny Florida to snowy DC today.
My schedule is VERY up in the air — come on airlines! — so I am doing my
best to post some content today here as time warrants. Be patient with me. Operations should be back to normal by Wednesday at the latest!
On Sunday, “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker played for Democratic
Senate Leader Chuck Schumer something he had said in early 2024 regarding President Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity.
Here’s what Schumer said back in February:
I talked to President Biden, you know, regularly, off sometimes, several
times in a week or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is
great. It's fine. It's as good as it's been over the years. All this right
wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.
Welker’s question was simple: What did Schumer say to people — including Democrats — who felt as though he (and other senior party leaders) had
misled them in regards Biden’s actual condition?
This was Schumer’s response:
No. Look, we didn't. And let's -- let's look -- let's look at President
Biden. He's had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the
most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal -- since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record.
And he's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it
on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic
Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him
This is wrong — on two counts.
Let’s deal with Schumer’s second claim first — that Biden "stepped down
“on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic
Party, for America.”
While Biden may have been the one to send out the tweet on July 21 saying
he was getting out of the race, it was, um, not his choice.
Biden took weeks after his disastrous debate performance on June 27 to get
out. Even in the final days before he stepped aside, Biden insisted that
only the “Lord Almighty” would cause him to reconsider his plan to run for reelection.
The simple fact is that Biden was absolutely pushed out of the race — by
Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama among others. He was nudged, repeatedly, to
the edge of a precipice. At which point, he was given the option to say
that he jumped. But, if we are being honest, he was given no choice. (And
he’s still bitter about it!)
I know Schumer and the rest of the Democratic leadership are invested in
trying to sell the idea that Biden made some sort of selfless decision for
the good of the party and the country. But, in the words of a guy named
Joe Biden, they are entitled to their own opinions but not their own
facts.
But, honestly, that is a smaller point compared to the other one that
Schumer is making — that neither he nor any other Democratic leader misled
the public about Biden’s actual physical and mental condition.
To believe that is true, you must believe this: There was NEVER a day or
an hour or 10 minutes in which these leaders spent with Biden in 2024 or
2023 (or before) that approximated the president’s condition during the
June 27 debate.
That what we saw in that debate — after the Biden inner circle had
shielded him from press conferences, media interviews and the like for
months — was an absolute one-off, a combination of a bad day and Biden
being sick with a cold.
But, we know that isn’t true. We know that lots of Democrats who
interacted with Biden even before the debate had noticed he was less
cogent, more foggy — and worried privately about his ability to make it
through the remainder of the campaign, much less be the president for four
more years if he won.
Here’s actor — and prominent Democrat George Clooney — writing on July 10:
It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago
at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He
wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at
the debate.
Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop
telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.
And here’s the Wall Street Journal on June 4 — three weeks before the
debate:
When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in
January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times
that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people
familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points,
paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that
some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.
And the New York Times on July 3:
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that
he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even
though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to
be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.
There’s lots more reporting. LOTS. And it all points to the same thing:
There were tons of people — including loads who SUPPORTED Biden — who had registered concerns about his physical and mental acuity BEFORE the June
27 debate.
Given that, it is impossible for me to believe that people like Schumer
never saw any sign of Biden’s decline. Literally impossible.
To my mind, Democrats lost a whole bunch of credibility — without their
own voters as well as Republicans and independents — by trying to insist
that everything was just fine with Biden.
And until they admit they did so, I think they have an issue with voters.
One they won’t be able to easily solve.
https://chriscillizza.substack.com/p/democrats-are-lying-to-themselves
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