Original Sin: Inside the Biden Disaster

Joe Biden started running for President in 1987, and achieved election to the nation’s highest office 33 years later. Once there, a man first elected to the U.S. Senate at 29, was fatally unwilling to hang it up even entering his eighties.

In their new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Coverup, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the authors chronicle Biden’s decline, efforts by aides and enablers to cover it up, his insistence on running again — and the string of disasters that resulted. The principal disaster is, of course, the second Trump presidency.

The book raises many related issues. It rightly points out that the U.S. Capitol functions as a “most privileged nursing home” for elders, some on their game (Nancy Pelosi) and others fading (Mitch McConnell, Dianne Feinstein). It probes the role of handlers, some who worked with Biden for three decades and were blinded by his foibles and his past ability to “get up.”

The insiders, running Biden’s presidency,  were known as “the Politburo.” They too had interests in holding on. “Welcome to the world where power is distributed by seniority,” write the authors. “And when spouses, children, staffers, and lobbyists invest deeply in the life and success of an individual politician, they grow reluctant to give it all up.” Nor do people at the centers of power want to go back to their “boring lives.”

As the book points out, however, the inside story of the 2024 election was eclipsed by the outside story. The American people picked up on the infirmities, from Biden’s slow gait to his forgetfulness. The Democratic Party did not, until Biden’s disastrous debate performance a year ago. Late in the day, ex-Speaker Pelosi and ex-President Obama gently prevailed on Biden to withdraw his re-election candidacy.

In parliamentary systems, even once-popular prime ministers get shown the door or know when to go — Canada’s Justin Trudeau the latest example. On May 10, 1940, as German troops moved west, veteran Conservative lawmaker Leopold Amery confronted PM Neville Chambertain, his friend of 40 years, echoing Cromwell’s words: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!!” Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Winston Churchill.

When Biden went, he anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as successor. She had just 107 days to mount and execute a campaign, and no campaign for the nomination, as Biden prescribed, was permitted. A primary contest can spill blood, but it also races the blood of democracy, vets the candidates, and exposes the electorate to new leadership. As Original Sin points out, the Democrats boasted a strong bench.

“We got screwed by Biden, as a party,” in words of David Plouffe, manager of the 2012 Obama campaign, who was called into the Harris campaign on a “rescue mission.” Plouffe was one of the few of the 200 claimed sources for this book willing to go on the record. The Harris campaign made the case of Trump’s being a threat to democracy — which he is — while underestimating inflation and the economy. They courted suburban Republican women, and were without time to reach out, assemble, and motivate the Obama coalition of minorities, working women, and youth.

As the authors point out, Biden was always gaffe prone. In Iowa, he famously asked a legislator in a wheelchair to “stand up so we can see ya.” He was caught appropriating, word for word, a self-description by Britain’s Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. He inadvertently called attention to Obama’s inexperience on the world stage, during a 2008 fundraiser at the Seattle Sheraton.

The clique around Biden, while shielding the public from his infirmities, assumed Biden would pull himself together, as he had done in the past. After all, the guy had rallied from a near-fatal aneurysm and recovered from the death of his son and heir-apparent Beau Biden. He took his Senate seat in 1973 soon after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash.

But, with “episodes” piling up — and Biden sometimes failing to recognize longtime aides— the president’s handlers had cognition problems of their own. Biden still had good days, rallying NATO against Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and pushing through a bipartisan infrastructure package, but achievements could not defy aging.

Two Seattle-area House members played parts in the drama of Biden’s withdrawal. As leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash, tried to drive Biden to the left with a $2 trillion Build Back Better package, holding infrastructure hostage in the House. That was a failed strategy. Jayapal, once a high-profile Bernie Sanders surrogate, later emerged as a Biden loyalist.

By contrast, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash, was one of the first to say it in public and private: It was time for Joe to go. Tapper and Thompson write: “Adam Smith was watching the White House and the Biden campaign dig in. He became convinced that the only way to get Biden to leave the ticket would be to aggressively and publicly say so.”  Smith called Biden’s chief of staff to say that he was about to go public.

Curiously, it is our longest serving congressman — Smith was elected in 1996 — who has best sensed the nation’s discontent. He was the first, and for a long time the only member of Washington’s delegation to back Obama in 2008.

In the end, it wasn’t just the Democratic Party that got screwed; it was the country. We ended up with a revenge-minded convicted felon in the White House, with a Cabinet filled with eccentrics and toadies.

Our corner of America’s electorate did not vote for the guy but now are feeling the cuts. Trump is hurting our ability to forecast weather and to fight wildfires. Thousands stand to lose Medicaid coverage. The hunting and deporting of immigrants threatens our agricultural economy.  The federal underpinnings to pro-Trump parts of the state — e.g. nuclear waste cleanup at Hanford, Fairchild AFB, Bureau of Reclamation — are facing the chain saw.

As the Republican nears its 250th birthday, we have on our hands an erratic would-be dictator. Blame Biden, the Politburo, the party, and in part the media and the public. We sensed what was happening but did not rise to reject an awful Biden-Trump choice. It did not have to be so.

This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.