Colby Cosh: The public history of Joe Biden’s pantomime presidency

News commentators' last-ditch defence of the president's mental capacities may have failed, but the U.S. still has a zombie in charge

Published Sep 04, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, is embraced by U.S. President Joe Biden during a campaign event at IBEW Local Union #5 on Sept. 2, 2024 in Pittsburgh, Penn. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In the world of the nanosecond news cycle, memory becomes tenuous, which is why editorial writing so often has a flavour of “Did that really just happen?” An excellent example is served up today by Reason’s Matt Welch, who looks back in (uncharacteristic!) anger at the six-month last-ditch defence of Joe Biden’s capacity to run for and serve a second presidential term. Welch has been filing away receipts, reminding us of how Biden’s enfeebled nature became obvious to the general public even as media commentators lined up to insist he was still sharp as a razor.

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With Biden successfully persuaded to make way as the 2024 Democratic nominee for Kamala Harris, no one is now bothering with these defences. The persons who made them certainly hope they will be forgotten, and they certainly won’t be remembered vividly enough to be a source of shame. And, meanwhile, Biden is still president.

It was a strange interlude in which the American presidency finally put on the full costume of a late-medieval imperium. The United States is widely supposed to have a government of laws, not of men — but consider how the entire drama over Biden’s cognitive collapse went into high gear in the first place. A star Department of Justice lawyer, Robert Hur, was appointed special counsel and charged with investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents as a private citizen (between his time as vice-president and his presidency). Hur, acting as a creature of the executive branch, found evidence that Biden was technically guilty. But he declined to follow through with a prosecution, partly because a jury would be sure to sympathize with a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

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Logically, under the whole “laws and not men” theory of government, Biden couldn’t very well get the exculpating benefit of Hur’s judgment without the factual soundness of that judgment being accepted on some level. In the meantime, Hur had confirmed in an official way what everyone already suspected from their rare and limited glimpses of Biden speaking extempore in public settings. I.e., that the man’s marbles were spilling out onto the floor and making an awful racket.

Hur was promptly attacked by the White House, denounced as treacherous by an array of columnists, and forced out of the Justice Department. The day after he resigned, a redacted transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden was released, and the mainstream news media, with one voice, hastened to reassure the public that the contents weren’t as ghastly as you might have thought.

In the period that followed, Biden became even more formidably enclosed within what White House operatives explicitly called “bubble wrap,” and news consumers couldn’t help becoming increasingly preoccupied with the dramatis personae immediately adjacent to the president, including his short-tempered wife and his crack-loving son Hunter.

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The entire situation seemed to have splattered forth out of the pages of Procopius or Horace Walpole. Intrigue is a natural feature of all politics, which is why we have a word for it, but this was the first time Americans might reasonably ask of their executive: “Uh, so who’s really in charge?” John F. Kennedy’s royal court was so old-fashioned in nature that people unashamedly called it Camelot — but there was never any doubt who wielded Excalibur.

The Democrats’ purely tactical problem has been solved, and the organs of the prestige press have welcomed the Kamala Era with rapture. This is all very well, but how and when did the interests of the Democratic Party become the central concern of much of the American news media? Also, isn’t the zombie president still president? The general attitude toward this seems to be relief: the Democrats have hope, which means America has hope, but the dignity of the sacred person at the heart of the Constitution has been preserved, at the expense of a few months of uncertainty and, perhaps, executive government on autopilot. And we will all struggle merely to preserve the memory that this, indeed, happened.

National Post

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