Opinion: Biden let us down

Opinion by Patrick T. Brown

(CNN) — President Joe Biden deserves the same respect any former president gets for having served our nation. But the widespread praise he is receiving for his decision not to run for election should be tempered by the way his administration handled his all-too-evident decline.

It had become clear that last month’s disastrous debate performance was not a one-off anomaly. A growing number of news reports suggested a president who skipped evening events, required extraordinary accommodations from his staff and foreign leaders, appeared more and more listless and forgetful, increasingly relied on teleprompters for even routine occasions — and still got key details wrong. Anonymous advisers told the press they didn’t know how key policy decisions were being made. The White House had to correct the record on the nature of doctors’ visits by the president.

And yet, until an earlier-than-usual late June debate, the American public largely didn’t know about this. It took a nationally televised flameout for these reports to break through, illustrating two trends in contemporary American life, neither of them good. It provides another prime example of how siloed our country has become, and how impulses of political purity can end up silencing critical voices. And it showcases how the language of individualism has corrupted our leaders’ ability to think about their party’s — or nation’s — long-term well-being.

The revelations didn’t get much oxygen before the debate because the president’s team had used the threat of a second Trump administration to aggressively shut down press inquiries into his ability to do his job long before the debate. Their actions showed more loyalty to the president personally than any commitment to “bring transparency and truth back to the government to share the truth, even when it’s hard to hear,” a first-day promise that now reads like a laugh line.

The lion’s share of the blame falls on White House staff, who seemed to think they could brazen their way past questions about the president’s acuity. But there’s enough to go around.

Despite having a front row seat to the goings-on at the White House, few mainstream media stories discussed Biden’s worsening cognitive abilities in great depth prior to the debate. One of the rare major investigations of the rumors of the president’s increasingly frequent verbal slips and mental blocks came from The Wall Street Journal a few weeks before the debate and was promptly shot down not just by Democrats but by other outlets. In retrospect, the report barely scratched the surface of what has been reported since the debate meant the problem could no longer be denied.

This is not a sign of a healthy media environment. The fact that so many in the legacy media and centrist institutions were taken aback by the president’s poor performance in June despite substantial documentation of the issue in right-leaning publications suggests too many were stuck in a news bubble that left them ill-informed.

The second, and more long-term consequence of Biden’s attempted end-run around the press, is what it says about our relationship with American institutions. A White House concealing health scares and making policy through a shadowy chain of command is the type of thinking that would make conspiracy theorists blush. Edith Wilson may have been able to run the government in the place of her ailing husband President Woodrow Wilson after he suffered a stroke, but that’s not a precedent Americans should uphold.

I disagreed with many of the Biden administration’s policy goals but took him at his word when he said he ran for office in 2020 because he wanted to set America down a better pathway. Biden seems to have earnestly believed that he alone could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020, and likely felt that way about 2024.

But when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked him what his reaction would be to a potential defeat this November, the president answered in the way you might expect a Little Leaguer before in a winner-take-all playoff game: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”

The presidency is not a prize for self-esteem. Biden’s stated rationale for staying in the race started to sound an awful lot like the self-absorption of his opponent’s quote that “I alone can fix it.” And this kind of thinking is a death knell for any claim on public trust. Trump has his own issues on that score — though time will tell if the horrific attempt on his life in Pennsylvania earlier this month will reorient his campaign.

At a time when public opinion polling shows decreasing confidence in any number of institutions, from the police to Congress, from the courts to churches, from the media to big business, the White House was attempting to pull a shell game with voters in an election year. Their strategy was to give us a glimpse of the president here, some teleprompter addresses there, and certainly no events scheduled after dinner.

It was a selfish choice. Democrats can be grateful to the president for giving them a fighting chance for their party to hold the White House. But it is not true, as Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett posted to social media on Sunday afternoon that, “We owe President Biden a debt of gratitude that we may never be able to repay.” The president deserves credit for making his ultimate decision. But the fact it took a debate blowout to reveal his inability to execute the duties of his office should leave Americans furious that so many enablers were determined to run cover.

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