How former president Biden cost Democrats the presidency

If the goal of Joe Biden's “Politburo” was to hide reality and convince Americans the former president was fit for another term, it may have been the least successful cover-up since Richard Nixon sought to avoid complicity in the Watergate scandal. That's because even before Biden gave history's worst presidential debate performance — and longer before the recent Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson disclosures of how truly bad things had gotten in the White House —polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans had already reached the conclusion he should step down.

- Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

Indeed, members of Biden's palace guard were not the worst villains in this whole unhappy episode, which resulted in the 2024 Democratic loss to Donald Trump. After all, they only did what White House palace guards always do: protect their principal and portray him in the best light. It was the other top Democrats who saw enough and probably knew enough about Biden's age and his mental state to know their party needed a different standard-bearer if it was to prevent the return of Trump but they lacked the political courage to do anything.

After all, it didn’t take a political genius to understand that, at the very least, the Democrats had undertaken a giant riverboat gamble in sticking with a president who showed increasing signs of physical and mental frailty and would be 86 at the end of a second term.