Politics is a fickle business. One day, the idea that Joe Biden is unfit to be president is heresy; the next it is progressive orthodoxy. No greater example of this can be found than in the comment pages of the New York Times. Overnight, the great-and-the-good of liberal opinion has turned on their former hero, delivering a series of withering verdicts on the 81-year-old White House incumbent.
‘Joe Biden failed at his key task,’ began Josh Barro ‘showing voters he’s still cut out for the presidency.’ ‘Biden cannot go on like this’ declared Frank Bruni; Jamelle Bouie called him ‘raspy and stumbling.’ He ‘looked ancient and sounded lost,’ concluded Clinton enthusiast Michelle Goldberg. ‘There will now be a new chorus of cries for him to drop out, and I’ll be joining it.’
‘He sounded like a dying humidifier’ cried Matt Labash, ‘or my great-grandfather giving his last will and testament.’ Asked for the most pivotal moment of the debate, he suggested ‘Biden’s brain freezes and non sequiturs’, adding ‘Even if he grew stronger as the night wore on, Biden seemed like he was auditioning for the glue factory.’
Bret Stephens was even harsher: ‘His very presence on the stage felt like a form of elder abuse. On the paper’s podcast, Ross Douthat started with this blunt summary: ‘We should just say Biden is too old to be running for president of the United States.’ But perhaps the most damning indictment of all was delivered by Thomas Friedman, a close confidant of the President. He wrote:
I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime – precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.
To borrow from LBJ, if Biden has lost Friedman, then he has lost the nation…
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