President Biden passed on a friendly interview with CBS News during the Super Bowl, giving up free access to the largest television audience of the year. That’s not something smart candidates do during a heated reelection fight — especially candidates who are trailing in most of the polls.
But Biden has been passing on everything, preferring to hide and let others do the talking for him. It makes you wonder why.
Special Counsel Robert Hur really threw a monkey wrench into Biden’s reelection plans. It was already a tall order to get an 81 year old who has obviously lost a few steps over the years — honestly, watch any old video of Biden and compare it to today, even montages put together on his official account show this. But Hur’s report made it an even steeper climb.
It was one thing to have Republicans, up to and including former President Donald Trump, call Biden senile. That’s how politics works, and it can easily be dismissed as such. It’s something else entirely to have it on official Justice Department letterhead.
Although Hur didn’t call Biden “senile,” that was the effect. He chose not to charge Biden, he wrote, because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
This left the White House and Biden’s allies in the media with a couple of options, none of which are good. They could insist that Joe Biden is mentally fit to stand trial, therefore nearly demanding he be charged, or they could grudgingly accept the legal conclusion while mostly ignoring the above quoted passage.
Of the two, most would agree the latter is the better option. When he was president, Bill Clinton demonstrated the power of ignoring a swirling scandal all around him, then, once enough time had passed or the truth had come out, admitting to everything and declaring it “old news.”
This can only happen with the media on your side, and even though they’d started out as severe critics during his intern sex scandal, they’d all come around by the time the script was flipped. It worked.
The Biden White House appears to have chosen this path, quickly condemning Hur, then moving on with “testimonials,” naturally from people whose livelihoods are dependent on Biden winning. These insistences of Biden being “sharp” in private meetings carry all the sincerity of the declarations of the line “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life,” from The Manchurian Candidate.
It led to the simple question asked by Jon Stewart upon his return to hosting “The Daily Show”: Anyone video tape those meetings?
“Because, if you’re telling us behind the scenes he is sharp and full of energy and on top of it and really in control and leading, you should film that,” Stewart said, almost begging.
But you can’t film what didn’t happen.
Biden is 81 years old, of course he’s slowing down. If you talk to some of his old Senate colleagues, he was never that fast to begin with. And the problem isn’t that he’s old, necessarily, although polls show the public has their concerns about his age. It’s that he and everyone around him feel the need to lie about it.
The public accepts that people age. It’s happening to all of us. What we don’t like is being told that we are somehow morally defective for noticing it in this particular person. We are supposed to look away every time Biden is unsure of how to exit a stage he just entered moments earlier; to avoid wondering why he no longer uses the big stairs that everyone has always used to board Air Force One, instead going up the shorter stairs in back.
We aren’t stupid or depraved, but Democrats are treating us like we are both. That’s what people don’t like, and that’s what leads to low approval ratings and polls showing you losing in every battleground state.
As long as Biden is able to do the job, people wouldn’t care if it took him a little longer to get to his seat. But we haven’t seen him doing his job in a long time. The only proof of life we get are occasional, quick teleprompter readings before a hurried shuffle to the door.
Maybe Biden can’t remember much from the last few years, or maybe he’s pulling an Uncle Junior — the Sopranos character who attempted to avoid prosecution by faking senility until he actually succumbed to it. But if Biden has nothing to hide, why won’t he stop hiding?
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).