Joe Biden could fall at any time.
Joe Biden could fall at any time.
S ometimes a small thing is fraught with meaning — and with peril.
So it was with Joe Biden’s stumble, or near-stumble, depending on how you want to characterize it, at the G-7 summit in Japan.
He lost his balance going down steps at the Itsukushima Shrine on Friday to greet Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, and managed to regain it with some quick steps and focus. He stuck the landing and could shake the prime minister’s hand like nothing happened.
But how close was he and the United States to major international embarrassment and a seismic political event? A couple of inches either way? It’s impossible to say, but maybe.
If Biden were to do a face-plant, even down a few steps, it could be very ugly. Fairly or not, it’d be a symbol of U.S. decrepitude. It’s one thing to have a senior senator from California who obviously should have hung it up several years ago; it’s another to have a president of the United States lacking the agility to get around easily anymore.
He also could get badly hurt. Mitch McConnell fell a couple of months ago and had to be hospitalized. He suffered a concussion and broken rib. Again, it’d be another order of magnitude for this to happen to a president of the United States, especially on video.
Now, I don’t say this with any pleasure. As anyone who has dealt with a parent in decline knows, aging and its attendant loss of capacity are frustrating, heart-breaking, and humiliating.
In addition, of course, it only gets worse. No matter how rocky Biden was on those steps the other day, he’s presumably only going to be shakier in a couple of months, let alone a couple of years.
In their apparent willingness to acquiesce to another Biden nomination, Democrats are looking away from the enormous risk this represents to their political prospects and Biden’s.
Biden could take a wrong step at any time, and there’s no guarantee that it would happen on a convenient timetable for Democrats, when, say, they could still go in another direction. In fact, it could happen on a catastrophic timetable — if something happened to Biden in late October 2024, it could easily throw a close race to his Republican opponent, including Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s polling took a hit in 2016 after her fainting spell on September 11.
While the public might sympathize with or slough off the health troubles of rank-and-file politicians (see: Senator John Fetterman), any adverse Biden event would confirm widespread doubts about his capacities and about the wisdom of him running again. It’d be likelier to make him look foolhardy for having taken on, once again, at age 80 or 81, the physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing enterprise of a national campaign, rather than like the victim of circumstances out of his control.
Moreover, it would make Biden the issue in the campaign when the whole idea is supposed to be that he can repeat his role as the default candidate, making the other guy, especially Trump, the focus of the race.
All of this should be factored into any calculus of how electable Biden is, or how strong a candidate he is against Donald Trump. It’s understandable that Democrats feel they are stuck — there’s no good way to leverage an incumbent out of office if he doesn’t want to go, and, of course, there aren’t readily evident strong candidates waiting in the wings.
James Burnham famously said, “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.” There may be no good alternative to Biden for Democrats, but having to hold your breath every time he climbs or descends the Air Force One steps is a big problem, and one that isn’t going away from now until November 5, 2024.