The Democrats' Problem Goes Well Beyond Biden

The Democratic Party is sclerotic. It’s easy to heap blame on Joe Biden now that he is weak and powerless. But that’s a convenient way of avoiding a major reckoning.

By Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs

“He totally fucked us,” says Kamala Harris’s former top campaign aide David Plouffe. He’s quoted in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the much-hyped new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson. Plouffe appears to think that it was entirely Joe Biden’s fault that Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. “It’s all Biden,” he says. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party.” Plenty of top Democrats in the book think similarly. The “original sin” of the title is Biden’s decision to run for reelection, which many leading figures in the party are now willing to admit was a terrible decision. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people,” says one senior Democrat, calling the decision an “abomination.”

Biden was clearly in no shape to serve a second term, at the end of which he would have been 86 years old. The public understood this. In 2022, a majority of Americans said that Biden lacked the mental sharpness to be president, and by 2023, three quarters of Americans thought Biden was too old to run for reelection. As this magazine noted early that year, only seven percent of voters were enthusiastic about Biden running again. It was obvious that Biden was suffering at least some level of age-related cognitive decline. He had always been rambly and often incoherent, but there were more and more concerning lapses, like forgetting the number of grandchildren he had (in fairness, this was confusing, since at the time the official Biden family number was lower than the actual number) or getting completely lost in the middle of his sentences. The president became a national punchline—“Biden Forgets Nation’s Name,” ran a 2023 Onion headline.

It was so obvious that Biden should not have been running for reelection that Original Sin is almost superfluous. Yes, we all knew that, we all saw it, and some of us were saying at the time that Biden had no business running for a second term. The only real mystery left is why there were so many Democrats determined to, in Tapper and Thompson’s words, “pretend [Biden] wasn’t mentally melting before our eyes,” even though their denial ultimately had catastrophic consequences.

In fact, plenty of senior Democrats knew that the situation was far more concerning than the public even understood, and “what was going on in private was worse.” The party line during Biden’s presidency was that while he could be halting and incoherent in public, in private he was sharp as a tack. (And I do mean the party line. As the New York Times reported in 2023, “so many [Biden advisers] use the phrase ‘sharp as a tack’ to describe him that it has become something of a mantra.”) This didn’t make too much sense (why would he suddenly spring to life when the cameras were off?), nor did the explanation that his fumbling was due to a childhood stutter that had not been noticeable for the first four decades of his political career. But Tapper and Thompson take us behind the scenes, showing that the public often saw a deceptively coherent Biden, thanks to the careful curation of his appearances (only during certain hours of the day), avoiding unscripted moments, shortening speeches, editing videos, etc. An attempt at a 5 minute video had to be reduced to 2 minutes because “much of the footage was unusable” since “the man could not speak.”

Biden had to script his own Cabinet meetings, with staff asking Cabinet secretaries to prepare questions beforehand so that he could read the answers off notes during the meetings. Things were bad “from the beginning,” according to one cabinet secretary. Since “at least 2022” Biden “had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day.” (He called National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan “Steve,” though as Jon Stewart pointed out, Sullivan looks like he could easily be a Steve.) There was a “limit to the hours in which [Biden] could reliably function and an increasing number of moments where he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades.”