Ignorance vs. Deception
What's worse?
Joe Biden! You know the discourse. The mainstream media has decided, at last, the 81-year-old president is too old to run again. His televised debate performance was that catastrophic. There is chatter of a promotion for Kamala Harris, a contested convention, the possibility that Biden, who has secured more than 99% of the delegates needed to be the Democratic nominee, will step aside. Many writers, pundits, political operatives, and politicians have said they were shocked by Biden on stage, that they didn’t know he had deteriorated so much.
Readers may have detected a hint of schadenfreude on my part because I wrote, in New York Magazine, Biden shouldn’t run again—in September 2022. And in early 2023, for this Substack, I pointed out Biden’s various age-related deficiencies and argued, again, he probably shouldn’t run. I would love to tell you I am a genius, a voice of a generation, the lone wizard to be believed above all others—Oracle Barkan, they call me.
Except they don’t. I’m not a genius, nor a lone wizard. I’m a voice for myself, and that’s about it.
I wrote those pieces because I decided to pay attention. Biden was stumbling badly in public. He thought a dead congresswoman was still alive. He thought his son Beau died in Iraq. He was, plainly, nothing like the man who vociferously debated Paul Ryan in 2012 and helped rescue Barack Obama’s re-election.
He was, at least midway into his term, cognitively diminished. This was obvious if you watched him enough. This was obvious if you weren’t a slavish devotee of the Biden campaign or the Democratic National Committee.
But much of the media and political class foisted a different narrative on the American public. They collectively shouted down anyone who questioned Biden’s fitness for a second term. They sustained this illusion until June 27, 2024. After that, they realized they couldn’t save their Lear.
What’s worse, truly? A media and political class that actively lied to the public? Or a media and political class that was so inept, ignorant, and cloistered that it failed to recognize the reality in front of them?