Has the press been covering for Joe Biden over the past few months? Until now I've considered this to be little more than typical Fox News nonsense, but I'm beginning to wonder. Here is Olivia Nuzzi:
This April, at a reception before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I joined a sea of people waiting for a photo with the president and First Lady in the basement of the Washington Hilton.... The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady.... I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.... My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile.... He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
The whole story has much, much more. Nuzzi says she's been hearing questions about Biden's mental state since January, always sort of whispered and always anonymous:
They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record).... Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
....Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.... Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”
As Nuzzi acknowledges, she's been skeptical of Biden's stamina for years, and is hardly a Biden family favorite. Still, there's no reason to believe she's making this up.
I've known older relatives who have shown some slippage over the years and it's genuinely hard to know if it's really gotten bad enough that something needs to be done. A misstep here or there might mean they're declining or it might just be a misstep here or there. How bad do they have to get before you have The Conversation? How often do the missteps have to occur? Anyone who's dealt with this—and that's a lot of us—knows this is hard.
But it sure sounds as though Biden's debate performance has finally given everyone permission to say what they've been thinking for the past half year or so: Yeah, it's bad. Someone needs to have The Conversation.
But no one has.
This was a fairly ordinary employment report with no special gotchas to report. It's basically an extension of the gradual slowdown in the labor market that we've seen over the past couple of years.
