If Biden were as self-aware as Eisenhower
President’s refusal to stand down is harming his legacy.
In his debate performance on June 27, and televised interview with George Stephanopoulos on July 5, Biden demonstrated twice in the space of eight days that he is “living in another world,” writes Talmage Boston.(Susan Walsh / AP)
Contributing Columnist Talmage Boston (Michael Hogue)
On two occasions in 1955 — June 4 and Aug. 15 — 64-year-old President Dwight Eisenhower sent letters to his friend Swede Hazlett, confiding that he did not want to be the kind of leader who “hangs on too long.” Ike noted that “the last person to recognize that a man’s mental faculties are fading is the victim himself.”
Forty days after his second letter to Hazlett, Eisenhower had a severe heart attack. During his extended convalescence, Ike stayed mentally alert and managed to handle his presidential responsibilities with the aid of his inner circle. When Eisenhower regained his strength, he decided to run for reelection and enjoyed a largely successful second term before leaving the White House in January 1961 at age 70 — more than 11 years younger than Joe Biden is now.
In the context of the nation’s escalating concern over whether President Biden still has the capacity to handle his Oval Office responsibilities, let’s turn back the clock four years to June 21, 2020. On that day, The Dallas Morning News published my op-ed titled “It’s time to require senior citizen presidential candidates to undergo complete physicals.”
My essay included an analysis of how the 25th Amendment came into being in 1967, and mentioned the unlikelihood that its fourth section, which covers the scenario where a president is no longer able to fulfill his duties but is unable or unwilling to admit it, would ever be invoked. Under that section, the process for replacing an incapacitated president can only be commenced at the direction of his vice president and the majority of his Cabinet.
Presumably, the only conceivable situation in which that would ever be used would be when a president lies comatose for an extended period of time, as Woodrow Wilson did following his massive stroke in October 1919 that disabled him for the remaining 15 months of his second term and caused his wife to become the real (though unofficial) president. When President Ronald Reagan was shot in March 1981, he regained mental acuity shortly after his successful bullet-removal surgery, and there was no need to invoke the 25th Amendment.
In making the testing requirement argument four years ago, I quoted former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, for her description of the Iron Lady’s medical decline, which started at 75 and lasted until her death at 87: “Sufferers look and act the same, but beneath the familiar exterior, something quite different is going on. They’re in another world that you cannot enter.”
In his debate performance on June 27 and televised interview with George Stephanopoulos on July 5, Biden demonstrated twice in the space of eight days that he is “living in another world.” His empty expressions, blank eyes, incoherent statements, inability to maintain his train of thought and egregious misrepresentations of his record all prove it. Among his misstatements: “I’m the guy that shut Putin down.” Despite Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine, now aided by North Korea.
“I’m the only president that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world.” Despite 13 American deaths suffered in his disastrous Afghanistan evacuation.
Biden is hardly the only politician who isn’t afraid of letting the facts get in the way of a good talking point. His opponent, former President Donald Trump, issued thousands of false or misleading statements during his time in office, according to fact-checkers, including that the coronavirus was under control, that he didn’t know about hush money to a porn star, and that the 2020 election was stolen.
Until the last two weeks, the main issues in the 2024 campaign were the two candidates’ performance in their previous terms, the policies they seek to pursue in a second term, and their character. Now a fourth issue has become more important than any of these three. A declining president clearly operating “in another world” makes an increasingly dangerous world even more dangerous for all Americans. Can any sensible person expect Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un to not take advantage?
Ike famously ended his presidency on a strong note with a farewell address that warned the nation of the military industrial complex’s undue influence over our government’s operations. Biden is ending his White House years on a uniquely weak note marked by bad judgment, as described by Maureen Dowd in last Sunday’s New York Times: “Biden is not running to stop Donald Trump. He’s running because he and his sycophants are power hungry. … We don’t know who is running the country. We only know who shouldn’t be.”
In the last two presidential ranking polls conducted by CSPAN in 2017 and 2021, Eisenhower was ranked by 150 leading historians as the fifth greatest president, trailing only Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and both Roosevelts. By refusing to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race despite his clear incapacity to serve for four more years, Biden is doing his dead level best to be ranked among the five worst.
