Published February 12, 2024
Do the people around President Joe Biden care about him at all? If so, why do they encourage him to remain in the Oval Office, much less to run for yet another term?
Biden’s physical and mental decline is obvious to everyone. Despite a very light public schedule, everyone can see his rapidly expanding list of verbal miscues, physical frailties, and bizarre memory lapses—such as claiming to have recently spoken to long-dead foreign leaders. And now there is special counsel Robert Hur’s conclusion that Biden should not be charged for mishandling classified information because the president is, to use now infamous language, an “elderly man with a poor memory.” According to Hur, Biden could not remember the dates when he was vice president and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Biden responded to the report by promptly holding a press conference in which he had even more memory lapses. The president’s decrepitude is only going to become more of a political liability. As The Babylon Bee stingingly put it, “Man Ruled Too Senile To Stand Trial Still Fine To Run Country.” Who still thinks Biden is up to the rigors of the presidency? As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 70, “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” And if Biden is unable to manage his administration, then who is making the decisions? Is it his wife, his chief –of staff, whoever happens to get his attention during a lucid spell? Whoever it is, the American people are not impressed with the results.
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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently working on a study of Kierkegaard and labor. As a cultural observer and commentator, he is also fascinated at how our secularizing culture develops substitutes for the loss of religious symbols, meaning and order.
