Joe Biden won the normality test in 2020.
There wasn’t anything remarkable about him. He just seemed like a steady hand who had been around for a while, who didn’t look or sound like a radical, and who knew how Washington worked.
He wasn’t the leader of a movement, wasn’t charismatic and wasn’t particularly witty or well-spoken. He was, in fact, completely uninteresting and utterly conventional. He was just the most normal guy in the room.
He benefited from a favorable contrast with the magnetic, endlessly interesting, constantly outrageous, norm-busting President Trump, whose theatrical and chaotic governance made him vulnerable to a basement campaign run by a candidate happy, in ice-cream terms, to be vanilla to Trump’s rocky road.
If Democrats hope to rerun the 2020 campaign, they will once again have plenty of material to work with against Trump. It’s the other side of the equation that’s the problem — the supposed safe alternative is AWOL and never coming back.
That erstwhile Joe Biden, the generic, broadly acceptable president, didn’t survive contact with the reality of his presidency.
Of course, he destroyed his reputation as the steady hand with his disastrous mishandling of Afghanistan. It’s not just that he kneecapped our allies and abandoned Americans — but that he insisted everything was fine.
After this, it was impossible to look at Biden the same, and indeed his approval rating has never recovered.
The border is even more damning. Biden took a situation that was under control, blew it up, refused to readjust when the consequences became obvious, insisted that the crisis wasn’t a crisis as it began to be felt all over the country, and engaged in blame-shifting — all because he was beholden to a radical ideology hostile to borders as such.
This wasn’t moderate or competent. And it certainly wasn’t normal.
Even if Biden’s record were unassailable, the way he walks and speaks now would make it impossible for him to be a nothing-to-see-here conventional politician again.
Watching Biden mumble through speeches, get confused about his stage directions, mix up names and old memories, and walk so stiffly and awkwardly that he seems at risk of stumbling or falling at any time is deeply unsettling.
Democrats will take comfort from the president’s fiery State of the Union performance, but Biden shouting his way through an extensively rehearsed speech on a teleprompter didn’t make him seem any younger and won’t allay the well-founded concerns about his age.
In the latest New York Times poll, 71% of people agree strongly or somewhat that Biden is “just too old to be president.” This is unprecedented territory, and is politically perilous when you hope to be the default candidate arrayed against an unacceptable alternative.
Donald Trump, who in so many ways is an outlier in American politics, is now matched up against another outlier. The normality advantage that Biden enjoyed in 2020 is gone, and defeating his Republican adversary has, accordingly, gotten that much more difficult.
Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review