As anyone who is interested in American politics knows by now, Original Sin (Penguin Random House) by journalists Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) is not about the primeval sin of Adam, but - in the words of the book's subtitle - President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. By this week's publication date, so much had been written and said about the book (not to mention all that had already been written and said about the broader topic) that reading the book itself might seem almost redundant. Yet it is still a very informative exercise.
Enjoyable too as reading, but also tragic as an account of the state of our politics. “The original sin of Election 2024," write the book's authors, "was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” The book is a frightfully step-by-step account of how the people closest to President Biden enabled and facilitated his disastrous determination to run for a second term, paradoxically resulting in the very thing this effort was supposedly all about avoiding - Trump's return to the White House. (That outcome has to be an inseparable part of the analysis. The end result - especially this end result - really matters.)
It is a genuinely damning indictment of much of the Democratic party's political class, in particular the "Politburo" in the White House and the Biden family itself. In my modest opinion, it should also serve as an indictment of the authors' own journalistic class, which (not for the first time in American history) was also at least somewhat somewhat in the know about the president's aging (or at least the widespread worries about it) and certainly should have been more proactively critical about what was happening.
For the record, I have admired Joe Biden as president and willingly credit him for some very effective leadership both domestically and on the international scene (Ukraine, NATO). Although i voted for someone else in the 2020 primary, by then I knew it would be Joe Biden who would most likely be the one to save the party from Bernie Sanders and save the country from Donald Trump. But none of that meant he should run for a second term. Like the aide quoted in the book, "I love Joe Biden," but "it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again."
The book effectively highlights what is one of the many disadvantages of our presidential system (in contrast to a parliamentary system). The U.S. President is an uncrowned king, and there exists no effective mechanism for replacing him by party leaders or others. Like the Roman Empire of old, our presidential system resembles a mighty monarchy masquerading as a republic. Combine this will the prevailing notion that only two-term presidents are successful (a particularly perverse incentive increasingly built into the modern presidency), combine this with the insulation of modern presidents from public opinion by politically ambitious sycophantic staffs, and finally the widespread acceptance of gerontocracy in the U.S. government, and the inevitable result was the 2024 disaster. "Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it."
One can acknowledge (as I do) the real accomplishments of the Biden presidency. One can continue to admire the man and to wish him well in this latest health crisis. At a personal level, the story is a truly tragic one. It has been suggested that Biden's difficulties may largely date from the effects of his son Beau's death and then were exacerbated by his son Hunter's personal and legal problems.
At the same time, the Democratic party and the country need to come to some reckoning about what went wrong in the run-up to 2024 and to acknowledge the colossal errors on the part of the President, his family, his "politburo," and others.
Some would suggest that the even earlier original sin was the selection of Kamala Harris as running mate in 2020. At the time, I thought there were better alternatives available, and it appears from this book that Biden himself may have thought so. But what was bizarre about this was that, once in office as Vice President, Harris, instead of being supported as a possible successor, was widely used as some sort of insurance to justify Biden's running again, on the theory that Harris could not win against Trump. In the end, of course, she didn't win. But had Biden announced at the end of 2022 (after the midterms) that he would not run again, the party primary process might well have chosen either a stronger candidate than Harris or alternately a candidate Harris who was more practiced and better positioned to defeat Trump. Despite his impressive win 2024, Trump's reelection was not inevitable and might have been prevented by a more timely process of raising up a younger more dynamic candidate than Biden.
If I keep harping on the election, it is because the consequence of this tragic chain of events is what matters - has been so, well, consequential. Of course, presidential health issues - and cover-ups - are not new. In fact, they have been all too common and surprisingly consistent. From Woodrow Wilson to FDR to JFK to to Biden, the consistent pattern has been for the political and journalistic classes to obscure the truth from the American people. In this case only, however, has the outcome been so catastrophically consequential for the life of the nation.
In the months before Biden's disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024, like many I assumed there was a distinction between doing the job, which, again like many, I believed Biden still capable of doing adequately, and the performative, communicative parts of the job, which he was obviously failing at, but which I was willing to argue were less important and somewhat overrated by our contemporary media culture. There is, I think, still good reason to believe that Biden remained effective in those areas in which he was most engaged - e.g., Ukraine, NATO, and, after October 7, the war in Gaza. However, he was notably ineffective, for example, on immigration, which turned out to be immensely consequential for the election. Tapper and Thompson cite Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) who "had come to believe that Biden's inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue" of immigration. And they cite former Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain's belief that Biden's being "kind of locked down in the White House" in 2023 and focused on foreign affairs "had diminished his ability to talk fluidly about a broad range of domestic political issues."
The book's coverage of the final crisis becomes a literal day-by-day account after the debate (which Tapper had co-moderated). That period included the infamous interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which Biden was asked how he would feel if he lost and Trump were re-elected. He replied, "I'll feel good as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as [sic] job as i know I can do, that's what this is about." The authors record Nancy Pelosi's internal reaction that that was not enough, since the stakes were so high. This highlights the apparent conflict between the personal and the political, between the personal President's interest and the public interest.
The other dimension of the crisis which became more evident in the aftermath of the debate was the contrast between what had been claimed about the President's fitness and what the entire debate audience had seen for themselves. Congresswoman Susan Wild (D-PA) articulated this when she said on a congressional Democratic zoom, "If I defend the president, I lose my integrity. How do we go after Trump for lying if people see us as liars?"
In a sense, that summarizes the problem that persists for the Democrats. There are undoubtedly many reasons why the Democrats lost the confidence of American voters, but surely an important contributor was the failure of the Democratic political class to be fully honest about such a serious problem.
It is often remarked how the Republicans seem blinded to political reality by partisanship and an apparent personalty cult. This story suggests that, for a time at least, so were the Democrats. In the end, the Democrats recovered, but too late.