The Scene
Almost one year ago, Rep. Lloyd Doggett became the first Democrat in Congress to urge Joe Biden to end his re-election campaign.
The Texan, only four years younger than the now-former president, got plenty of flak for it. These days, as Democrats try to move past the 2024 campaign and Biden’s disclosure this week that he’s battling an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer, Doggett feels somewhat vindicated — even if he won’t describe it quite that way.
“Clearly, there were some people around the president that were in denial,” he told Semafor, adding that Biden’s diagnosis is “sad” and wishing him a “full recovery.”
“He should have been a transitional president, as he said initially he would be,” Doggett added. “And the only regret I have is not having moved earlier.”
The Tuesday release of “Original Sin,” a book focused on the obfuscation of Biden’s declining faculties by those closest to him, is sparking the party’s umpteenth reckoning on Biden’s choice.
Many Democrats say voters don’t ask them about him, but his diagnosis has added a tense twist to publication week: Speculation by some Republicans that the cancer might have been discovered earlier, but hidden for political purposes, has offered the former president’s colleagues an opening to defend him — if they choose to take it.
And several of them did take the opportunity to seek sympathy for Biden as the book raises uncomfortable questions about senior Democrats’ willingness to challenge the then-president’s decision-making.
“It’s revealing, but not surprising, that they’re so cruel as somebody suffers,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. He ran for president in 2019, urging Biden to “pass the torch” to a younger generation.
“There are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward, at a time when they actually are taking health care away from the American people,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Monday. “No. As House Democrats, we’re going to look forward.”
Yet no Democrat was ready to second-guess the party’s abandonment of Biden in favor of a doomed Kamala Harris campaign. Had Biden stayed in and won, the party would now be dealing with an ailing president and more Republican questions about who knew what about his condition. Democrats who worried about nominating an elderly candidate in 2020 had lost the argument with their voters; in 2024, they paid for it.
The new book, co-authored by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper, portrays congressional Democrats as nervous and trusting, airing fears about the president’s ability to perform and win in 2024 that were waved off by dissembling White House staffers.
The book illustrates a small group of Biden advisers engaged in a cover-up: top Jill Biden aide Anthony Bernal, longtime Biden strategist Mike Donilon, and both of the former president’s chiefs of staff.
“They were very anxious about rolling the dice on any young candidate because of Trump. They wanted a seasoned hand,” Swalwell said of his fellow congressional Democrats. “I do think that an earlier change certainly would have served us better.”
The View From Conservatives
Republicans wished Biden well after his diagnosis but didn’t move off their basic position: That Democrats and the media engaged in the greatest cover-up in history when it came to his declining capabilities, and they were not done asking questions about it.
“I blame him less than I blame the people around him,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on his way to Rome after the diagnosis.
“I don’t believe that they just found out Friday, because they’re not credible on anything they’ve done,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told Fox News of the Biden family.
Leo Terrell, a senior Trump Justice Department official, suggested on X that Jill Biden had committed “elder abuse” by encouraging her husband to run again.
But “Original Sin” contains no evidence of a theory that many MAGA-aligned Republicans have entertained for years: That someone else was running the country, not Biden.
Room for Disagreement
Some Democrats are so queasy about the flogging Biden gets in “Original Sin” that they’re edging away from past conclusions that his re-election bid was misguided from the start.
Former Pennsylvania Rep. Susan Wild, who narrowly lost her seat last year, is quoted in the book worrying that she “cannot campaign with Joe Biden” and “if I defend the president, I lose my integrity.” As the book’s release approached, she took another tone.
“We would be so much better off if Dems had unified behind him,” Wild wrote on X over the weekend.
David’s view
Democrats who want questions about Biden to go away will probably never be satisfied. What might have happened, had he not run again, is a counter-factual up there with “What if Lincoln had kept Hannibal Hamlin on the ticket?” and “What if Ted Kennedy had tossed the keys to a designated driver?”
Too many 2028 hopefuls are on tape defending Biden’s acuity, or at least his decisions, some (like Pete Buttigieg) from inside the Cabinet. Democratic primary voters may not want to revisit Biden and may even reward candidates who attack the media for asking about it; that attitude, however, put them where they are today.
But “Original Sin” is only partly about other Democrats, who mostly come off as loyal, nervous, weak, and finally, betrayed. Their betrayers are unlikely to matter again in party politics. Donilon is reported as promising to share polling that can show Biden’s path to victory, then not doing it. Bernal shuts down challenges to the president by saying that “Jill isn’t going to like this.”
A critical reader might connect Bernal’s defense of the Bidens to the anonymously sourced negative stories the New York Post ran about him last year. And a more cynical reader might want Tapper to be more introspective and ask: Why didn’t the press uncover this stuff sooner? The answer in “Original Sin” is that Biden’s inner circle protected him from scrutiny and reacted to a drumbeat of age questions — which started before he was inaugurated — by tightening that circle. But throughout the campaign, key figures in press never stopped covering Biden’s age and its impact on voters.
During that fatal June debate with Trump, for example, when CNN colleague Dana Bash heard Biden mutter that “we finally beat Medicaid,” she passed Tapper a note: “He just lost the election.”
Biden’s camp inherited his distaste for the Beltway media and his confidence that he could bounce back from anything. Perhaps their biggest sin was looking at the friendly media infrastructure built around Donald Trump that still tosses him softballs, and asking: Can we get one of those?
Notable
- In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last bemoans how “all of America” failed the 2024 election test, not just Biden. “We blame Joe Biden because he was the last link in the chain and because it’s safer than coming to terms with the reality.”
- In the Columbia Journalism Review, Richard J. Tofel argues that the 2024 campaign books don’t probe deep enough into what Democrats with political futures knew about the president. “Joe Biden failed the country in deciding to seek a second term. But the press also failed in its job to confirm, in undeniable fashion, what the voters already knew.”
- In The Wall Street Journal, Brianna Abbott and Annie Linskey investigate why Biden’s medical tests didn’t reveal his cancer earlier. “The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is currently probing whether top White House officials concealed negative information about Biden’s decline.