Opinion: Why a president in cognitive decline is still the Democrats’ least worst option | Nick Bryant
Maybe it is because his 79 years have traversed so much US history, but few sitting presidents have been compared with so many of their predecessors as Joe Biden. In keeping with the journalistic tradition of assigning each new occupant of the White House a presidential soulmate from the past, commentators initially likened him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat he so desperately yearns to emulate.
For all these historical parlour games, however, we are ultimately left with the reality of the here and now: Joe Biden is Joe Biden, a president who will almost be 82 at the time of the next election; an ageing incumbent who, despite recent successes, many in his party think should not seek a second term.
Two-and-a-half years on, I find myself in the same place. For all his flaws, for all his brain fades, for all the awkward moments when he has looked like a world-weary president at the end of his second term rather than midway through his first, he remains the Democrats’ most viable candidate. The big-name Democratic dynasties are also failing to deliver. It is now more than 40 years since a Kennedy mounted a run for the presidency, and the political fortunes of liberalism’s first family have never fully recovered from the weekend in 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. That very morning came news of Ted Kennedy’s car accident on Chappaquiddick Island, in which a young female campaign aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, lost her life.
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