If you weren’t aware until the debate with Donald Trump that President Biden is very much a senior citizen, that’s your fault. It’s similarly your fault if you didn’t and don’t know that Kamala Harris is more than a bit empty. Don’t blame Democrats, or the media, or social media censorship.
No doubt the excellent William McGurn at the Wall Street Journal knows what’s said above is true, yet in his latest Main Street column McGurn wrote as though until the debate with Trump, Americans were unaware of Biden’s mental frailties. In McGurn’s words, the debate “produced the disastrous performance that exposed what the White House and media had been hiding from the American people: an oft-lost and befuddled Mr. Biden.” McGurn’s analysis doesn’t read right.
To see why, conservatives need only look back to before Biden was elected. There were nightly accounts on the various Fox shows chronicling Biden’s seeming senility. The latter helped explain conservative calls for Biden to exit his basement in order to be further exposed, but also frustration with Trump in the first debate of 2020: if Trump could have avoided interrupting Biden, the blank, uncomfortable pauses that were even more evident in June would have powerfully revealed themselves in 2020.
Some will say that only conservative media exposed Biden’s frailties, but as conservatives have long noted with glee, Fox is well ahead of the other cable channels when it comes to ratings. It’s as though the right wants it both ways: alternative sources of news are cheered and used as evidence that market forces have corrected so-called MSM dominance on some days, but when it suits the narrative, it’s as though conservatives are limited to the New York Times and CNN.
Speaking of the Times, the debates between right-of-center Bret Stephens and left-of-center Gail Collins have been running on its editorial pages for how long? This requires mention if some are going to say conservative media exposed problems of senility that the Times and other outlets did not. Except that Biden’s old-people problems have been a regular driver of the conversation between Stephens and Collins for well over a year, and amid those conversations both expressed a strong preference that Biden exit the race. This is mentioned as a response to the popular view that MSM sources (that conservatives don’t necessarily read or watch as is) were somehow hiding or glossing over the obvious. They weren’t. No doubt they had their slant as all media sources do, but you can’t hide what’s so apparent, which is almost certainly why polls have long showed overwhelmingly, and well before the June debate, that the electorate felt Biden too old.
What’s true for Biden is true for Harris. This is why it was surprising to read the excellent Gerard Baker’s surely rhetorical query in the Wall Street Journal about whether “the Democrats” and a “collaborative media” will be able to “pull off their recasting of Vice President Kamala Harris from the verbally maladroit, politically inept, ruinous-policy-espousing electoral dud we have all seen over the past five years.” As always, Baker puts it so well, except that as evidenced by Harris’s own implosion in her 2020 run for president against a slate that included Biden, it’s apparent the Democratic voter base saw what Baker saw perhaps even sooner than Baker.
As for media, Fox News has long had fun with Harris’s inability to string a coherent sentence together. At the same time, so have must-read critics of Trump like Stephens at the New York Times, along with George Will at the Washington Post. It’s just not true that Harris’s ineptitude was an unknown in media said to cater to the left, and evidence supporting this claim can be found not just in Stephens and Will’s commentary, but in polling before Biden dropped out that revealed a clear Democratic voter preference for someone not Harris.
You quite simply cannot hide ineptitude, and the previous truth is amplified many times over in the age of smartphones. Which is another way of saying that regardless of your political lean, you’re not a victim. If you didn’t know Biden was senile and Harris shallow as a puddle, that’s on you.
Republished from RealClear Markets
