Did the people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 ever really stop to consider either the physical or mental health of this relic whose first year as president has seemed like an eternity, likely even to him?
Sure, some of the support for Biden was easy to discern. The hard left would vote for a potted palm, and perhaps even Kim Jong-Un, before they would pull the lever for Donald Trump. The uniparty political establishment so threatened by Trump’s success on their playing field would embrace, or at least accept, anyone who had roamed the corridors of Capitol Hill for decades on end. And lifelong, mainstream Democrats loyal to their party at every turn could never see their way clear to vote against the candidate with the D next to his name.
But what about all the rest of Biden’s support that brought him to a reported 81 million votes? Independent voters, including suburban dwellers, and most especially those vaunted Trump-hating white women of the suburbs, were most responsible for putting this aging career politician in the Oval Office by flipping their support for Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. It’s one thing to vote against a candidate because of his policies or, as was apparently the case with Trump, his personality. But it’s quite another when voting for the alternative requires turning a blind eye to the most basic of all requirements for serving in the most powerful position in the world: the ability to actually perform the job.
Unhealthy Approval Ratings
Well, it turns out that all the warning signs so clearly visible to Trump voters are now coming clear to the rest of the country. Those who chose to willfully ignore the visual evidence of Biden’s decline, to see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil about the non-Trump on the ballot, are now abandoning this president in droves – and not just because of prominent issues like the pandemic, the economy, and foreign affairs.
Biden has long had an issue with attributing the work of others to himself, as when he dropped out of his first presidential run in 1988 after revelations of plagiarism. But that was before he became the leader of the free world. Concerns about the mental acuity of the man in the ultimate public spotlight, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, will grow when he, for example, says he used to drive a tractor-trailer, when he had only ridden in one, or worse, claims to have acted as a liaison in the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt – when he was in law school at the time. There have also been a few embarrassing public gastrointestinal episodes all but ignored by the media, though they could not hide the image of him falling asleep at the recent COP26 summit in Scotland. These incidents fly in the face of the recent assessment by White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, who in his report on Biden’s November physical at Walter Reed Medical Center described him as “healthy” and “vigorous.”
Add it all up, and the result is a breathtaking 29-point turnaround on the issue of Biden’s health in the space of a single year. Only 40% of respondents in the latest Politico/Morning Consult survey believe Biden “is in good health,” while 50% do not. And in a 21-point reversal from a year ago, just 46% find him to be “mentally fit,” while 48% do not. It would be one thing if this poll was an outlier, but it falls right in line behind another recent Harvard-Harris poll concluding that 53% of voters have doubts about Biden’s fitness, with 58% saying he is “too old to be president.”
Dilemma for Those Who Ignored the Signs
The fact that so many Americans openly question the physical and mental fitness of any chief executive should set off alarm bells by itself, but two opposite factors have prevented this story from gaining further traction. First, of course, Biden is blessed with the bodyguard-like protection of big corporate media which has ignored or drastically downplayed the health angle since they pulled out all the stops and sacrificed their journalistic integrity at the altar of getting the guy elected. But the perception of his declining health has also been subsumed by an overall sense of defeat and failure which form the bigger picture of the Biden administration at this juncture.
Joe Biden
(Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)
The president’s overall low approval, collapsing support for his handling of the pandemic and the economy, and a vice president even more unpopular than the president have masked the growing concerns about his health.
But there is a single question that must be asked of those Biden voters now alarmed about his physical and mental fitness: how much has really changed with this oh-so-familiar career politician in the space of one year? While his campaign appearances in 2020 were rare, those times he did speak publicly did not for the most part go well. He appeared at best a step slow and at worst, showed classic signs of cognitive decline, even dementia. It was not noticeably different from what we see in this president one year later.
It is always possible that any president, no matter his current state of affairs, can improve his standing with the public on matters of policy. Biden has, if nothing else, demonstrated flexibility on long-held positions, tacking left to satisfy the Democrats’ progressive base. He can also move to the center when he chooses. But at 79 years old, there is no possibility that his health will improve, only that it will decline. Again, did it even matter to those who were so anxious to get rid of Donald Trump that they ignored the health issue and pulled the lever for Joe Biden, that he would become by far the most elderly man ever to ascend to the presidency – five years older than any president ever to take the oath of office?
But now it is too late to reverse their elevation of this man into the Oval Office, where he or his successor will remain for another three years. The response of one Biden voter in the Politico/Morning Consult survey may have unwittingly summed up the growing dilemma facing Democrats in the years ahead. To the question of whether she would vote for this president again in 2024, the woman said, “If he’s alive. I’m just saying.”
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
