The current crisis over Joe Biden’s frailty has twisted Democrats like me in knots.
Wednesday morning, July 10, actor George Clooney published an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for Joe Biden to leave the presidential race and make room for a younger candidate. Clooney joined seven other celebrities asking Biden to step aside, including Stephen King, Rob Reiner, Abigail Disney, the hosts of The View, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.
What’s more, that same Wednesday morning, two senators–Vermont’s Peter Welch and Colorado’s Michael Bennett–joined the eight congressmen and women publicly calling for Biden to stop running.
But it’s important to realize that ten senators and congressmen calling for Biden to leave the race is only a small fraction of the 260 Democrats in Congress and the Senate.
Joe Biden insists that he is hale and hearty and points out that he is the only Democrat who has ever won against Donald Trump. He also insists that he has the strength and stamina to be president for the next four years. Despite the fact that he is 81. Sixty seven percent of the public disagrees.
The New York Times, a pro-Democratic newspaper, says that Biden’s stubborn insistence on remaining the Democratic party’s presidential candidate is a ploy, “a strategy aimed at running out the clock.” Adds the Times, it is a tactic “to leave his party so little time to come up with another candidate that his opponents stand down.”
The current controversy began with Biden’s shocking performance at the June 27th debate with Donald Trump, an appearance that seemed to confirm all of the health accusations that Republicans had been making against Biden for years. Republicans had said that Biden is old, frail, senile, and is a mere puppet being manipulated by the Obamas. Many of those claims seemed verified by Biden’s debate performance.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is undergoing a real-world test of his strength and his cognitive ability. Thirty two heads of state for the NATO nations are in Washington for a summit that celebrates NATO’s 75th birthday.
In group photos, Biden does not look strong and commanding. But Politico called his NATO speech Tuesday July 9th “clear and forceful.”
And something else became obvious. Under Barack Obama in 2014, NATO demanded that its members spend two percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries. Donald Trump twisted arms and threatened our NATO allies in an attempt to get their spending up to that two percent level. But Joe Biden outdid him.
According to a NATO press release, under Joe Biden “defence spending across European Allies and Canada is up 18 percent, the biggest increase in decades.” Points out the press release, “23 Allies will meet the target of spending at least two percent of GDP on defence.” Concludes the NATO press release, “Over the past four years, the number of Allies hitting that [2%] target more than doubled.”
The truth is that Biden has shown strength on the international stage. He has stood up to Russia in Ukraine. In fact, F-16 fighter jets and five Patriot air defense systems are on their way to the Ukraine at this minute to help stop missile and drone attacks like the ones Monday that killed more than 38 people in five Ukrainian cities and flattened a children’s hospital in Kyiv.
So Joe Biden has been strong over the last three and a half years, not weak. He has been a powerful leader in global affairs, not a feeble one.
He has also been strong in domestic politics. Joe Biden has signed 49 bills into law. Including the infrastructure bill that Donald Trump said over and over again he would pass, but failed to put into law.
Yet there’s a problem. in his July 5th interview on ABC with George Stephanopoulos, Biden was asked if he is frailer now that he’s 81. He is frailer. You and I can see it. And Joe Biden is known among Democrats for telling the truth. But he answered that no, he is not frailer. Which was clearly not true.
Which means that Joe Biden may be in denial. And a man in denial may not be the best president.
But here’s the killer. Donald Trump never tells the truth. He is also in denial. Denial of the facts. So as our next president, Trump may be far worse.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/us/politics/biden-campaign-strategy.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/11/poll-biden-drop-out-election/
American allies fear Biden is finished and can’t beat Trump
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https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_226749.htm
https://apnews.com/live/election-biden-trump-campaign-updates-07-10-2024
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-2024-race-democrats-who-want-him-to-step-aside/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/opinion/joe-biden-democratic-nominee.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/09/biden-nato-speech-00167186
https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-built-f-16-jets-way-ukraine-from-denmark-netherlands-blinken-says
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kyiv-attack-33aecd50cf252ff6184c0c14f90588b5
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.