In case anyone was wondering, Joe Biden is every bit as unimpressive out of office as he was in it.
The individual who exited the stage partway through last year’s performance — a surreal tragi-comedy beleaguered by negative critiques and low spectator turnout — has now returned.
His mini-rehabilitation tour in the media is, in accustomed Biden fashion, doing more to undermine his case for himself than buttress it.
He doesn’t appear especially coherent, reminiscent of a relic that was inadvertently uncovered after being neglected in a Smithsonian storage room.
It falls to Biden to justify why he believed he could campaign for the presidency once more in 2024, only to reconsider when it was almost too late and faced with his party’s insurrection.
The former president can’t say the truth, which is that he selfishly put aside every consideration except his own grasping desire to cling to power. And so, he has to prevaricate and rationalize.
According to Biden, he was a victim of his own prowess. He told the BBC that he was “so successful on our agenda” that it only made sense to keep his foot on the accelerator.
“It was hard to say now I’m going to stop,” he said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.”
It is true that Biden spent an ungodly amount of money, but a $7 trillion federal budget didn’t make him any younger or more capable of serving.
Believing your own press releases is bad, but believing a tight coterie of family and aides that has no incentive to be honest with you is even worse. Biden did the latter.
When asked by the BBC if he should have dropped out sooner, he insisted, “I don’t think it would’ve mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”
This is willfully clueless. If Biden had said he wouldn’t run again in good order in 2023, Democratic voters would have had a chance to have their say about who would be the party’s nominee via the primaries; instead, the democratic process was short-circuited.
When Biden says he left “when we had a good candidate,” what he means is that he left when the late date meant there was no alternative to going with Kamala Harris.
Biden can pretend that the compressed timeframe for the Harris campaign didn’t make a difference because her coffers were flooded with cash, but her aides disagree.
At the end of the day, Biden is left the unpalatable choice of either blaming himself — his own poor governance and lack of self-awareness — for the Democratic defeat in 2024, or, blaming the inadequacies of his replacement, which is awkward since he picked her as his VP.
The right answer is both and all of the above, but on “The View,” Biden took the convenient and predictable way out by blaming sexism and racism for Harris’ loss.
Never mind that the signature ad of the campaign wasn’t about Harris being a woman, but about her being unwilling to protect women from males competing against them in sports, and that Trump’s winning coalition in 2024 was more multiracial than in 2016.
One reason that Democrats have lost touch with much of the electorate, by the way, is that they assume so many of their fellow Americans are inherently racist and sexist.
Biden’s final delusion is his contention that he could have won if he’d stayed in the race.
It’s doubtful, though, that his abysmal job-approval rating was survivable, and it certainly wasn’t when paired with the deep and pervasive public concern about his decline, so sadly evident throughout his presidency and especially during his debate with Donald Trump.
That’s why Democrats, finally and when they had no other alternative, dumped him.
His media appearances serve only to emphasize how they unquestionably made the right call.
Twitter: @RichLowry
