Biden is weak — and unstoppable – By Eric Levitz (Vox) / Feb 23, 2024
It will be hard to convince the president that he isn’t the best of his party’s bad options.
Joe Biden is very old. He was born closer to the Battle of Gettysburg than the 2024 election. He was an adult before the JFK assassination and a senator before the fall of Saigon. And it shows.
The 81-year-old president was never a pristine public speaker; he’s also struggled with a stutter for much of his life. But in recent years, Biden’s oratory has grown increasingly stilted and slurred, his gaffes more frequent. He recently referred to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as Helmut Kohl (who left the German government in 1998) and Emmanuel Macron as François Mitterrand (who has not been the president of France since 1995).
Shortly after these slips, special counsel Robert Hur released his report on Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. Hur acknowledged that there was no strong case for prosecuting Biden — unlike Donald Trump, he promptly returned all classified documents in his possession upon the Justice Department’s request. But the report also made many editorial comments about the president’s cognitive capacities. It referred to Biden’s “faulty memory” and “diminished faculties,” and it claimed that he “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
