Everyone saw it. Not even most Democrats could deny it. President Joe Biden looked positively decrepit in the first presidential debate on Thursday night. He struggled to maintain trains of thought. He garbled words and flubbed statistics. He looked like an old man long past his capability of serving as president of the United States.
Coming to that conclusion should not be a partisan claim. It should not even be controversial. Thursday night’s Democratic disaster really did not tell us anything new. Anyone paying attention can see that Biden has lost a step or three both physically and mentally. But the debate did push that reality in the faces of the voters, preventing it from residing as a background thought in our normal lives.
Whatever the political fallout, Biden should find a way to step away as gracefully and peacefully as possible. He showed the opposite of what the Founders envisioned for the office Biden occupies.
The Constitution vests the president with the nation’s executive power. This power requires energy in its enforcement of existing law. A president must be decisive, active, and swift when ensuring that the laws are faithfully executed. Otherwise, our laws are not carried out with the vigor necessary to make them effective.
Without such effective enforcement, our laws lose an essential purpose. We want the laws obeyed so that through that obedience our lives, liberties, and properties are respected by fellow citizens. Yet we know human beings will not always follow the law when it does not seem to serve their own interests. The executive power uses force, threatened or real, to demand that citizens adhere to the law.
Returning to Thursday, Biden looked more like a man lost, not in command. He appeared weak, not strong. He seemed timid, not decisive. If he were a congressman, that would be bad enough. However, congressmen can hide their frailties behind a collective veil. The same cannot occur for the president.
Biden’s appearance in the presidential debate also should cause alarm for our foreign policy. Presidents take the lead in international relations to a degree beyond the domestic sphere. Presidents negotiate treaties, enforce trade agreements, and serve as commander in chief both during war and peacetime. Foreign affairs can change quickly and with significant consequences. Presidents must bring their internal energy to the international sphere in particular, lest people suffer deprivation or violence due to presidential inability.
In light of Thursday’s performance, we should consider anew the purposes and powers of the presidency. That reconsideration also asks what qualities we desire in that office’s occupant. We spend too much time discussing personality quirks or policy positions. We spend too little considering the nature and function of the office.
People continue to struggle socially, spiritually, and economically. Biden simply does not cut it as the man needed to exercise the office of chief executive effectively.
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Democrats seem to be asking hard questions in the debate’s aftermath. They should. It might or might not be good for the Democratic Party for Biden to step aside. And that might or might not, then, be good for former president Donald Trump.
But, regardless of those calculations, Biden stepping aside would be good for the country.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.