How the Indigo Blob runs a bluff
Were efforts to conceal Biden’s age-related decline a “conspiracy”?
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a four-byline story detailing dozens of examples of the White House taking steps to conceal President Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. The story suggests this went beyond mere gatekeeping and that Biden hasn’t been operating at full capacity or even keeping up with the ordinary demands of the presidency. “Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy,” the Journal reported.
I’d call the story a “bombshell,” except none of this is a surprise: Biden’s shortcomings eventually became so apparent that he was forced to leave the presidential race. Before then, though, there were plenty of signs, too, from the White House’s sparse public schedule to a special counsel report that called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Moreover, you might have reasonably expected problems given that the late 70s and early 80s are frequently an inflection point for physical and mental decline. (Biden assumed the presidency at 78 and is now 82. And, yes, it’s a big problem that Donald Trump will also be 78 when he begins his second term next year.)
But despite Biden’s declining condition being an open secret in Washington — apparent to all but the most gullible, partisan Democrats — until recently you’d get a lot of pushback for pointing any of this out. In July, even after the debate, Politico ran a story headlined “Conservatives See a Conspiracy Around Joe Biden’s Stumbles”:
Since before the 2020 election, Republicans and their conservative allies have loudly proclaimed that Joe Biden’s lack of mental fitness disqualifies him from America’s highest office. Now, in the wake of the president’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, many of those same voices are taking up a different rallying cry: We told you so. And the media covered it up.
The collective post-debate gloating from conservatives is in full swing this week, as Democrats reckon with the ongoing political fallout. But the immediate response on the right has focused less on the fact of Biden’s potential mental decline than on alleging that Democrats and the mainstream press colluded to hide it.
This alleged “conspiracy” theory appears to have been … more or less accurate? Certainly accurate when it comes to how Democrats behaved. The media’s role is a more complicated question. While the Journal had been a notable exception, and while the center-left media covered Biden’s age enough to trigger constant complaints from Democrats, there was also plenty of dismissiveness. For instance, the media largely bought into the White House narrative that unflatteringly edited video clips of Biden were “cheap fakes,” a new form of “misinformation.” Or take this Associated Press article from August 2023 — it approvingly cites S. Jay Olshansky, a “public-health professor and aging expert” who accused voters of “ageism” and claimed that both Biden and Trump were “super agers” not subject to the usual frailties of old age.
If you buy my theory of the Indigo Blob, the relationship between the center-left mainstream media and the Democratic Party is ambiguous. Sometimes, the mainstream media carries water for the Democrats, and sometimes, it covers them incredibly critically. It depends on the day, the news outlet, and the subject matter. The Indigo Blob contains multitudes. Some journalists see themselves as partisan foot soldiers fighting the good fight, while others are harshly critical of the partisan turn the media has taken.
On Biden’s age, you got some of both behaviors. On the whole, though, I think conservatives are correct that the media blew the story. Media coverage of Biden’s age conspicuously peaked in June and July when Biden’s grasp on the Democratic nomination was in question. It was covered as a horse race story — would Biden hold onto the nomination? — rather than a story about governance, even though the cognitive fitness of the leader of the free world couldn’t be a higher-stakes issue even absent the context of an election. Furthermore, media scrutiny of Biden’s age was probably helpful to Democrats during this period to the extent it encouraged them to replace Biden with Kamala Harris or another candidate who had a better chance against Trump.
But does this meet the definition of a “conspiracy”? I’m not sure the term is clarifying in this context — so let me suggest an alternative framing.