Like many of you, I’m starting to get sick of Jack Tapper’s “Biden cover-up” book tour. Here’s a newsflash, Jake: There was no “cover-up,” you just don’t know how to do journalism.This poster, who goes by the name of PorcelainDalmatian, points out that some people resisted this assessment:
It was obvious to anyone with two eyes, two ears, and three brain cells that Joe Biden was physically and cognitively impaired and shouldn’t seek a second term. Many of us, myself included, expressed our feelings on this board and others in 2022/2023....
None of us were geniuses or had any inside information, we just saw what we saw. Biden barely did public appearances, which is always a bad sign. When he did, he was stuttering and hesitant. He trailed off, both verbally and physically. He shuffled about. He looked terrible: The hair loss, the squinting to the point where you couldn’t see the whites of his eyes, the age spots. He looked like the Crypt Keeper from Tales Of The Crypt. And that’s just in comparison to the Biden of 2020!
We were told we weren’t “team players” and “you can’t ask a President not to run for a second term.” If I had a nickel for every snarky “I didn’t know you were his doctor!” comment on my posts, I’d be richer than Elon Musk.This poster is describing an America in which millions of voters, possibly a majority, thought Biden was obviously, self-evidently impaired, while his defenders insisted that he remained capable of doing the job, and would certainly do it better than Donald Trump.
And that's exactly what the polls said. Here's an ABC News/FiveThirtyEight story that was published just after Biden's awful debate with Trump:
... the debate didn't suddenly thrust Biden's age into the spotlight for most Americans the way it seemingly did for Democratic Party elites.... [A]nswers to specific questions about Biden's age haven't changed much ... because most Americans already thought Biden was too old....Here are some numbers:
When asked last September [2023] how much of an effect they thought Biden's health and age would have on his ability to fulfill his duties as president if reelected, 57 percent of Americans said his age would "severely limit" his ability. Right after the debate, that number was 61 percent. A significant share of Democrats, too, have long held concerns about the president's age and his ability to do the job. In September, 25 percent of Democrats said Biden's age would severely limit his abilities in his second term, while 30 percent said so immediately after the debate (and 27 percent in a more recent poll).
In a poll fielded between June 28 and July 1 [2024] (the weekend following the debate), 56 percent of Americans and 28 percent of Democrats said Biden's age was a big problem. But that's not so far off from a November [2023] poll in which 25 percent of Democrats and an identical 56 percent of overall respondents said the president's age was a big problem.So if there was a cover-up prior to the debate, it wasn't working. Non-Democratic voters already thought Biden was too old to be effective, and it's quite possible that Democrats thought he was still capable but impaired. The FiveThirtyEight story adds:
... 69 percent of registered voters said they somewhat or strongly agreed that Biden was "too old to be an effective president" in a New York Times/Siena College poll after the debate, including 55 percent of those who chose Biden in a head-to-head with Trump. But when asked to expand, 40 percent of voters who chose Biden and said he was too old said that his age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough," compared to 14 percent who said his age was "such a problem that he is not capable of handling the job of president."Even before the debate, it's quite likely that many Democrats would have said that Biden's age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough." (I would said it made him less effective but still able to handle the job well enough -- and certainly better than Trump. I still believe that.)
The fact that the media can't seem to move past this, and that a subset of Democrats can't get enough of this discourse, is a byproduct of the Republican Party's highly successful Stockholmization of both the mainstream press and the Democratic Party over the past few decades. Tapper and others seem to take great pride in saying, Wow, we really suck don't we? We did this horrible thing on behalf of the Democratic Party! We really deserve to be flagellated for that! Democratic insiders seem to take pride in saying the same thing, which complements the "I'm not awful like those woke Democrats" message so many of them are leaning on now. Both groups are wallowing in mea culpas because the GOP has brainwashed them into believing that if they beat themselves up while confessing anti-Republican bias, they'll win the favor of the Republican captors with whom they've fallen in love. (They won't.)
The public knew the pros and cons of voting for Biden in 2024. The media and Democratic insiders are telling us otherwise because they want to be chastised by the GOP.