How Biden's enablers may have delayed his bowing out

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In the wake of President Joe Biden's historic decision to abandon his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in his stead, nearly everyone has pointed to Biden's disastrous debate performance as the moment when his capacity to run for office truly came into broad public question. Not only did Biden falter during the debate itself, but his halting, unsteady performance stood in stark relief against the campaign's fervent claims that the president was both physically fit and mentally acute enough to wage a national campaign — to say nothing of leading the nation for another four and a half years. Biden did not simply have a bad debate night, but he did so at the expense of a longstanding effort by his team to portray the 81-year-old chief executive as spry and vigorous.

Questions about Biden's record-setting presidential age are nothing new, having played a not-insubstantial role in his last presidential election four years ago. Despite — or perhaps because of — those longstanding concerns, the president's unmistakably frail showings not only led to his ultimate decision to end his reelection campaign, but prompted many to ask whether some among Biden's aides and advisers have been publicly denying age-based concerns they privately know to be true. Biden's own claims of mental and physical fitness notwithstanding, was the president enabled by some to run for high office to the detriment of the voting public, and himself?

'An increasingly protective circle'

"While it's clear the president had aged in the past year," many White House staffers were taken aback by the "version of Biden, faltering and dazed, that showed up at last month's debate," CNN said. Many of those same staffers "blamed the president's inner circle of advisers and family" for orchestrating a "painstakingly choreographed daily operation designed to prevent him from being in unscripted settings for extended periods of time."

"It's not like Biden's inner circle didn't know this," said one Democratic strategist to the network. But while his inner circle may have, many in the wide constellation of Democratic operatives and donors feel "misled by what they say is an effort to tamp down concerns, raised well before the debate, about whether Biden is fit for a second term," The Wall Street Journal said. The president's "small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him," Politico said. That his difficulties during the debate "came as such a shock" to so many was the "result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon."

That alleged cocoon not only prevented the public from seeing the extent of Biden's aging, but may have prevented Biden himself from understanding this moment in history as well. "There was a belief that the president isn't getting an accurate assessment of where the race stands right now," said one member of Congress to Puck, following a phone call between lawmakers and the president in the weeks before he dropped his campaign.

'The price they will pay'

For their part, Republicans have seized upon the dissonance between Biden's alleged vigor and his apparent frailty by alleging the president and his team colluded to perpetrate a "whopper" of a "coverup" for which the Democrats will ultimately pay an electoral price, The Wall Street Journal said. Democrats "underestimate the price they will pay for lying this way" because for "all our willingness to forgive and forget, Americans don’t like being played for suckers." To that end, some conservative lawmakers have demanded audio from Biden's interviews with then-special counsel Robert Hur this past October, which would "show exactly what we all saw on the debate stage a couple weeks ago," and which Democrats "want to cover up," said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) earlier this month.

Biden's decision to run and remain in the race for as long as he did may have been the result of a close cabal of advisers shielding him, and the public, from the reality of his political viability, but in a way so too was his ultimate decision to drop out. Even as Biden was finishing his concession letter on Sunday afternoon, "unaware White House officials and the president's allies were still pressing reporters with comments about how determined the president was to stay in the race," The New York Times said.