The one person in America with the capacity to meet with President Joe Biden in person now and tell him face-to-face that the handwriting is on the wall, and for the good of his country, he should withdraw from the race and release his delegates, is President Barack Obama, writes Talmage Boston.(Gerald Herbert / AP)

Contributing Columnist Talmage Boston

(Michael Hogue)
On Aug. 7, 1974, at 5 p.m. Sen. Barry Goldwater led a small group of Republican congressional leaders to a meeting in the Oval Office with President Richard Nixon.

The meeting was prompted by the release of a “smoking gun” tape — recorded June 23, 1972 — by the White House that established, without a doubt, that six days after the Watergate break-in, Nixon had been intimately involved in the cover-up.

In the Oval Office, flanked by Republican Senate leader Hugh Scott and Republican House leader John Rhodes, Goldwater told Nixon that the handwriting was on the wall, and in no uncertain terms, he no longer had the support of most Republicans in Congress. Thus, with impeachment proceedings in the offing, the president should expect to be removed from office.

The night after the meeting, Nixon gave a televised address to the nation where he expressed his intention to resign as president and leave the White House the following day. He then followed through and Gerald Ford was sworn in as our 38th president on Aug. 9, 1974.

Presumably, had Goldwater not had the courage to deliver the cold hard truth to his own party’s president, the ugly, protracted, nationally debilitating saga of the Watergate scandal would have continued for several more months. Goldwater’s being a “profile in courage” — to borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer-winning book — in August 1974 has timely importance in the aftermath of last week’s first presidential debate when President Joe Biden demonstrated to the entire world that he does not have the mental acuity to perform as president for the next four years.

He began by shuffling to his podium and then stumbled, mumbled, lost his train of thought, stared vacantly and made it clear that at age 81, he has lost his fastball, curve, slider, cutter, changeup, and every other pitch that he once had in his repertoire.

The Washington Post said in its editorial after the debate that Biden’s performance was “calamitous” and well beyond a “senior moment or two,” and that he needed to spend the weekend “wondering whether he is up to the job.” The Post’s Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward called Biden’s debate effort a “hydrogen bomb disaster.”

Like the Post, The New York Times said in its post-debate editorial that Biden “needed to address longstanding public concerns about his mental acuity,” and after his disastrous performance, he now “needs to confront the fact that he failed his own test.”

Biden’s longtime friend and supporter, journalist Thomas L. Friedman, wrote in his New York Times essay that watching Biden’s debate performance “made me weep,” because now, “when great dangers and opportunities are upon us,” it is clear that “Joe Biden has no business running for re-election,” and to “put the country’s interest first,” he should “come forward and declare that he will not run for re-election,” because “time has finally caught up with him.”

Other than first lady Jill Biden, the one person in America with the capacity to meet with Biden in person now and tell him face-to-face that the handwriting is on the wall, and that for the good of his country, he should withdraw from the race and release his delegates, is President Barack Obama, Biden’s boss from January 2009 to January 2017. And yet, Obama has pledged his continued support to Biden and sloughed off the current president’s glaring mental deficiencies by saying, “Bad debate nights happen.”

It’s one thing for a bad debate performance to have happened in his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2008 when Obama was 47 years old and in his prime. People that age can have bad nights and bounce back from them. It’s something else when a frail and fading 81-year-old man performs as Biden did last Thursday.

Anyone who has ever spent time with declining octogenarians knows that they don’t get smarter, stronger or quicker. They only get more and more feeble. In 2024, Biden has demonstrated that he can still read a teleprompter, but he clearly lacks the capacity to speak extemporaneously and remember what his debate prep coaches told him in their intense preparations at Camp David during the seven days leading up to last Thursday’s train wreck.

Admittedly, a president’s corruption scandal in 1974 and a president’s mental inability to serve in 2024 involve different sets of facts, but the historical alignment between what Goldwater did with Nixon and what Obama should now do with Biden lines up.

For my next book on presidential history, I am tempted to write about true stories of presidential cowardice. Unless he can do what Goldwater did with Nixon — stand up to his party’s president and tell him the cold hard truth — Obama will be the subject of Chapter One.

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