I'll go public and say I was one of those four. I probably should have gone with "maybe", but I voted yes.
The reason for that is that I think the biggest problem with Biden is not that he's no longer "there", but that he's a doddering old man who simply isn't quick enough any more to do something like a debate.
But the presidency isn't a debate. The President isn't a quarterback who has to make lightning-fast decisions while the blitz is coming. The President has an army of advisers, can have people collating all the necessary information to make decisions and do his job, and can take the time to think about things. When his job is making decisions with the immediacy most often measured in hours or days, not seconds or minute, I think he's still able to do the job.
That said, I don't think he has the mental capacity to run for the job, which is a whole different set of skills. It requires public appearances like the debate where he certainly didn't show out as someone who trust to be the leader of the free world. You're not going to get elected looking like he looked last Thursday night. The debate was the chance to dispel all the "Sleepy Joe" criticism, and instead he validated it.
Please appreciate that I'm trying to do this in as non-partisan a way as I can because my honest opinion is that I'd be against him regardless of his mental state. That said, his obviously declining mental state troubles me because the staffers (on both sides) tend to be pretty radical. Basically this is because neutrals simply don't get involved in politics. The people who DO get involved are wing nuts (both sides). I think Biden's administration has been a bit more radical than it would otherwise have been because of this. He isn't "there" to reign them in.
Moving on, I get what you are saying and I can agree in almost all circumstances but there are some circumstances where making quick decisions is necessary. Realistically, his advisors would probably just act on his behalf and deal with the consequences later so it probably doesn't cause a major problem. That said, it does mean that his unelected underlings who (see above) are generally more radical than him are making decisions that they aren't Constitutionally authorized to make. Over the years there has been a lot of criticism (mostly from the left) of Haig's rather infamous "I'm in charge here" comment after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. Are we now effectively in that territory all, most, or some of the time?
My bigger issue from a nonpartisan perspective is that this isn't going to get better. I mentioned in the other thread that I went looking for Democratic takes after that debate. Cenk from TYT pointed out that this wasn't a 51 year old who had a bad day and will have better days later, this was an 81 year old. He isn't going to get better. I've compared to Fetterman but the situation there is very different because:
- Fetterman was running for Senator. There are 100 of them so he can't actually screw anything up by himself. And
- Fetterman's mental shortcomings were the result of a stroke and people do recover from strokes.
In this case I believe we are dealing with dementia. Whether it is Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or just plain dementia is largely irrelevant.
As many here know, I dealt with this within my family as I watched my father's decline. I watched the guy who taught me how to ride a bike forget how to hang up his coat. It is an incredibly painful thing to watch.
I think that is what we are dealing with here because I recognized a few things. I recognized the vacant stare. When we got photos ready for my dad's funeral we saw that in nearly all of the recent photos.
I've also seen the progression. It starts as lapses. Maybe four years ago when Trump was calling him "sleepy Joe" it was because of lapses but Joe was still mostly there. I pointed out in the other thread that I thought Trump made a humongous strategic error last time around by making a big deal of it BEFORE the debate. That lowered the bar and then Biden showed up for the 2016 debate and all he really had to do to clear the LOW bar was show up and . . . not look like he did last week.
In my non-partisan view, there are two things that concern me:
First is that this disease doesn't get better, it gets worse. I watched my dad's dementia progress from occasional lapses to being just plain "gone" over about 10 years. It starts as occasional lapses and otherwise completely lucid then over time that flips until it gets to the point where they are usually "gone" and have occasional moments of clarity. There isn't a cure. The drugs they prescribe aren't even supposed to STOP it, they are only supposed to slow it down. Even assuming that Biden's debate performance was a particularly bad lapse, the Presidential Term we will vote for in November runs from January 20, 2025 to January 20, 2029. Ie, it ends four-and-a-half years from now. I'm thinking back on my experience with my dad and if you add 4.5 years to when he first started looking like Biden did the other night, that ain't good. And that assumes that performance on June 27 was the first rather than that his inner circle has simply hidden this from us until now.
My second concern is that as my dad deteriorated, he had almost no idea how bad his condition was. Even in his moments of lucidity he was only vaguely (at best) aware that he wasn't lucid most of the time. I'll give you an example:
When we took my dad's driver's license away we blamed the Doctor (so that he wouldn't be mad at us). Shortly after that I took my dad to an appointment with his cardiologist. In the waiting room with people all around us, my dad was RANTING and RAVING about how stupid that Doctor was. My dad who prior to his decline probably swore about once a year was swearing like a sailor in the waiting room with people all around us: "That M-Fing Doctor", etc. Anyway, while he was doing this he decided to take his coat off so he had his coat in one hand and a hanger in the other and he literally couldn't figure out how to get the coat onto the hanger. At that point, he stopped ranting/raving/swearing in midsentence, handed me his coat and the hanger and said "here, you do this" then continued on ranting/raving/swearing. I was dumbfounded. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once. I looked at him thinking "You cannot operate a coat-hanger and you want me to put you behind the wheel of a 9,000 lb truck that we plow snow with?" I did a presentation on dealing with Alzheimer's and in it I admitted that my family and I made a colossal mistake in not taking my dad's license away sooner. We were incredibly lucky that he didn't hurt himself or kill someone. My parent's neighbor at the time was about 10 years old and named Milo. Milo would ride his bike up and down the street wearing his spiky mohawk helmet. What FINALLY motivated me to take my dad's license away was the realization that it wasn't about me nor even my dad. It was about Milo. I received permission from Milo's parents and in the presentation I do about dealing with Alzheimer's, when I come to this section I show Milo's picture (on his bike, with his helmet) and I implore people not to duplicate my mistake because they might not be so lucky. I tell them that it isn't about them nor even their loved one, it is about a kid like Milo who is riding his or her bike around and has their whole life in front of them. I tell them to take away their loved one's license because the Milos out there deserve to live that life, not get run over because they (like me) didn't want to deal with the fallout from taking Dad's (or mom's or whatever) license away. Ok, I'm back from my extended aside. My point is that the last person in the world who is going to know about Joe Biden's decline is . . . Joe Biden.
