Every Saturday, the Financial Times has a “Lunch with the FT” interview. This interview this past Saturday was with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The interview was mostly devoted, not surprisingly, to a recap, on the positive side of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. However, the interviewer, FT correspondent Dimitri Sevastropulo, apparently never addressed the elephant, or should I say, donkey, in the room. During the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker (R, Tennessee) famously said that the question was what did the President know and when did he know it.
The questions regarding Joe Biden, which Mr. Sevastropulo apparently did not ask, are: When did the President’s diminishing capacity start and when did Secretary Blinken realize it? But in the case of President Biden, there is an additional question: Given the President’s clearly diminishing capacity, how could Secretary Blinken possibly think that he could serve another four years and why didn’t Secretary Blinken say something?
Democrats will point to Donald Trump and accuse Republicans of doing the same thing. But there are Republicans who did not support Donald Trump, including both members of the Republican national ticket in 2012. The same thing cannot be said of Democrats – at least until President Biden’s condition became so obvious that it could no longer be hidden.
When history writes the story of the Biden presidency, the biggest scandal may not be anything Joe Biden did. Rather, it may be the near unanimous support of President Biden’s bid for re-election by top Democratic leaders – until they were forced, when the President’s decline could no longer be denied, to finally support somebody else.
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