Friday night, Hunter Biden offered a sad update on the health of his father, former president Joe Biden.
“The cancer has spread. It’s metastasized into his bones and further,” Hunter Biden told the BBC. “It’s very painful. It’s very debilitating in many respects, but he’s still out there. He’s still doing his thing, that is, he so believes in this country and as long as he’s alive, I’m promising you, he’s going to continue to fight.”
Left, right or center, we should all be praying for Biden in his fight against cancer, and that he be spared as much pain as possible.
But we’re also left with the uncomfortable confirmation that if Biden, his family and his most ardent supporters had gotten their way, and he had somehow managed to get reelected for another term in 2024, he almost certainly would have had to resign the presidency over these debilitating health issues by now.
As of February 2024, an astounding 86 percent of Americans believed that Joe Biden was too old to serve another term. (Try getting 86 percent of any group to agree on anything.)
But throughout the first half of the most recent presidential election year, Biden, his family and most of the Democratic Party establishment refused to acknowledge any possibility that another nominee might be a better option, or that there was any reason to discuss it. And then on June 27, 2024, Biden turned in his terrible debate performance. (Hunter told the BBC he believes his father’s bad showing that night may have been affected by the undetected cancer within him.)
Biden’s delayed withdrawal, taking another three weeks to announce a decision that felt inevitable, damaged the party. Biden later insisted that if he had stayed in the race, he would have beaten Donald Trump. (The polling strongly indicated otherwise.)
Why are today’s Democratic grassroots up in arms against the establishment and embracing far-left and socialist candidates? In theory, establishment candidates and incumbents are supposed to have all the advantages — name ID, fundraising, long-established close ties to interest groups.
But if you’re a Democrat, nothing that happened in 2024 reassured you about your party’s establishment. Almost everyone in the country thought the octogenarian Biden was too old to serve another four years; the party establishment insisted it would be fine. Then Biden flubbed the debate, and Democrats were told that there was no time and no need for a primary and that Vice President Kamala Harris was the only appropriate substitute. (Would a ticket of any two Democrats who had been elected statewide from any two swing states have done better?)
Had Harris won, the party establishment could argue it knew what it was doing. Harris enjoyed the convention she wanted, won her debate with Trump, and her campaign raised and spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks.
But not only did she lose, including the popular vote, but she also went 0 for 7 in the key swing states.
One last painful wrinkle was the country learning that the president had prostate cancer and had probably had it for several years and not known it because his doctors had stopped running PSA tests on his blood in 2014. Most Americans figured that doctors were watching an elderly president’s health like hawks; even Barack Obama’s White House physician, Jeffrey Kuhlman, said Biden should have been given a cognitive test during his final year as president.
After the multilayered debacle of 2024, the Democratic Party rank and file have every reason to ask the establishment, “Why should we trust you? In every key decision, you’ve gotten it wrong.”
You know who didn’t have anything to do with the Democratic Party’s bad decisions in the 2024 cycle? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and other left-wing voices in the party.
And now we see left-wing and Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates like Abdul El-Sayed winning key Democratic primaries in the midterms.
Joe Biden left the stage in January 2025, but the fallout from the way he exited, and the consequent mistrust and loss of confidence in his party’s leaders, is lingering far longer.
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