Now that departing President Joe Biden has outlived his usefulness to the Left, there is a new willingness to concede the press dropped the ball in assessing his ability to seek reelection and then serve a second term that would last until he was 86 years old.
"I thought Joe Biden was going to prove his doubters wrong at the big debate," the liberal blogger and columnist Matt Yglesias told Semafor. "I know that ever since that humiliation, the whole world thinks the entire media was in on a massive cover-up, but the fact is many of us (and seemingly many members of his team) genuinely thought the situation was better than it was."
"2024 was the year I posted my wrongest ever tweet," former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote in another year-end mea culpa. Hasan’s prediction before the fateful June 27 debate? "I think Republicans will regret setting the bar so low for Biden, and helping spread the distorted image of him as a guy who is totally out of it, suffering from dementia, no grip on reality, no ability to speak,” he posted on social media. “A very low bar for him to clear tonight.”
Of course, Biden did not clear it. Democrats and the media then hounded him out of the race, questioning both his fitness to continue to serve in office and to defeat the former president, and now president-elect, Donald Trump. Journalists now admit to getting the story about how the now-82-year-old was aging wrong.
"That would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate,” CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford said on Face the Nation when asked about the most underreported story of the year. Chris Cillizza, formerly of CNN and the Washington Post, posted a video apologizing for being too credulous about the White House’s defenses of Biden.
"In a lot of ways, it’s more embarrassing to have been gullible and wrong when so many people with no sources and no inside info could see it clearly, but that’s what happened — I was just wrong about one of the big questions of the year,” Yglesias added.
The truth was that anyone who watched Biden daily could see he was declining. The White House’s reliance on heavily scripted events also told the tale: Biden was, at a minimum, declining as a communicator who could drive a message.
Two things kept the denial about Biden’s true condition plausible. The first was the blue wall of Democratic media protection surrounding him, with key figures insisting Biden looked better in private when it really mattered than in public. The second was the adequacy of his performances in big, scripted moments, the last being his final State of the Union address.
Special counsel Robert Hur undermined both these defenses. The Hur report revealed Biden to be even worse in private than he often was in public. And Biden’s flailing press conference in response to Hur was his first truly bad public moment, a warning of what was to come in the debate.
It remains to be seen whether the question of Biden’s corruption will get the same second look. In the waning days of his term, pictures of Biden with his now freshly pardoned son Hunter’s Chinese business partners have been released to the public for the first time. We also have gotten to see Hunter Biden in photo ops with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
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We now know the soon-to-be former president was complicit in Hunter at least selling the illusion of access to his powerful father. The fact that the Hunter Biden pardon went beyond erasing his two felony convictions all the way back to 2014, when the elder Biden was vice president and his son was engaged in shady foreign business dealings, should make the previously uninterested ask if there was more to it.
Perhaps these uninterested parties will have moved on to the Second Resistance by then, unbothered by the past mistakes they now confess.
Hugo Gurdon will return next week.