King Lear gave up power too soon. President Biden will give up power too late.
And that’s Joe’s tragedy.
Unlike Biden, Lear had a loyal lord who told him the truth: When the old king disinherits his good daughters and divides his kingdom among his wicked ones, the Earl of Kent tries to tell Lear that he is ruining everything.
“What will you do, old man? Do you think that when power uses flattery, duty makes one afraid to speak?” King Lear, moved by the flattery of the wicked girls, cries out to Kent, “Get out of my sight!”
Kent urges the King to “take a closer look.”
Though some eyes are gouged out in “King Lear,” the play is really a lesson in inner blindness, the way power blocks our ability to see ourselves and the world. A leader’s lack of self-awareness can be destructive.
And that is exactly what President Biden is up to. At 81 years old, his raison d’être is to stop the lying, lawless Donald Trump, who will become increasingly unmanageable due to the outrageous Supreme Court decisions and his own aging.
But Biden’s claim that he alone could beat Trump was never true, and now he has lost the moral high ground by concealing evidence of his cognitive decline.
Trump is a master of deception, but Biden is just as skilled.
He, his wife, his vice president and his longtime aides have worked hard to create the illusion that all is well in Bidenworld.
The illusion vanished along with the argument.
I don’t know who’s running the country right now, but I do know who shouldn’t be running it: the president and the former president.
Republican lawmakers have been cowardly incapable of stopping Trump since January 6. In the days since the debate, most Democrats have avoided being honest with Biden.
We now know that Biden’s aides painted every scene with a Panglesian brush, creating a picture at odds with the one the world saw.
They praised the president’s back-to-back performances at Normandy, at a glitzy fundraiser in Los Angeles and at the Group of Seven summit in Italy, and dismissed the odd moment when the president was evasive, with people grabbing his arms to give him directions, as a misunderstanding.
But I was in Paris that week, marking the Normandy anniversary, and some of Macron’s advisers and European officials were alarmed by Biden’s blank looks, his moments of uncertainty about where he was.
I feel like I’m a hostage to Joe’s ego and his anger. If I don’t care if Biden isn’t smart enough to serve until he’s 86, I don’t care if he’s a president who fights for women to have control over their own bodies.
He can stand an Annie Leibovitz photo op, but he’ll have to wait two weeks before holding a live White House news conference to reassure people upset after he froze up during the debate and then admitted to donors that he “almost fell asleep” at the podium.
The president told Democratic governors on Wednesday night that they needed to sleep more and work less, Reed Epstein and Maggie Haberman reported for The Times.
Alex Thompson of Axios, who has reported on the minutiae of Biden’s sleep schedule, his orthopedic shoes, and his aides’ use of low doors and short stairs to board Air Force One, said the president is “firmly engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
But on Friday, Biden’s campaign announced an “aggressive travel schedule” in an attempt to prove he’s still up to the job.
Biden is in denial, and few are willing to tell us how he is slipping further into humiliation while dissecting every word he says.
Democrats should give the people what they want. Voters say they want fresh, provocative voices and a wider range of options than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Sen. Mark Warner is trying to rally other Democratic senators together to tell Biden to build bridges as he promised.
Let’s hold a caucus and check out the Democratic stars.
While some argue that Harris should be the obvious choice, James Carville believes a competitive race gives Harris the opportunity to gain the credibility she has missed as vice president. Even Rep. James Clyburn, a Harris ally, has said that if Biden does pass the baton, there should be a mini-primary before the convention.
And many believe that this election will favor candidates who are not part of the coastal elite.
Biden has been a vocal voice for decades, but his voice is weakening. His staff told him to tone it down. Then aides gave him fewer interviews, and none that were challenging. Biden began to mutter and trail off during meetings. The decline in his words is a sign that it’s time to stop pushing.
Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday that he would only withdraw if God almighty commanded him to do so. Asked how he would feel if his rebellion tilted the race toward Trump, Biden responded, “As long as I gave it my all and did the best job I could, that’s what this was.”
But with Biden calling Trump a “one-man wave of criminals” and the “greatest threat to democracy in American history,” that’s not true, and it’s time for the president to “take a closer look.”
