Rant alert! No problem if you decide to skip my rant.  I will not be offended in any way.  But still do yourself a favor and watch Trevor Noah’s video below. I happen to agree 100%.

During that painful time when Democrats started falling for the “cognitive decline” media narrative about President Biden I kept trying to tell people, there’s a difference between being old and having dementia. He does not have dementia. And when did ageism become okay?

I’m not an expert on dementia but I know a little something about it, having been a counselor in a nursing home.  Joe Biden does not have dementia. When we get older our brains work more slowly, but that doesn’t mean it’s dementia. It can just take longer to respond or think of a word or phrase.

Biden is a guy who can push out a lot of information on just one question. He talks fast and he has to compensate for a life long stutter which he largely overcame. For someone like him in particular, it could be difficult to think of everything you want to say, order it, and remember all your points in a time limited debate situation, for example. Standing next to a madman and trying to make sense of Trump’s insane gibberish is not really humanly possible. Especially with no help from the moderators who acted like nothing was wrong and would not referee. But that wasn’t dementia and it didn’t mean Biden wasn’t doing a good job of governing.

For every person supposedly in his inner circle that was “concerned,” there were others who said he was still sharp as a tack. I saw that too. He was a hard working president who by all accounts kept a grueling schedule.

I think he had enemies.

This is just my observation but some of the most outspoken among the early anti-Biden crowd were former presidential campaign managers – 2 Ds, one R – Carville, Axelrod, Steve Schmidt. I think they were all jealous of Biden’s success and brains. He was still relevant as President of the United States, the most powerful person on earth, while they were relegated to podcasts.  Am I being petty and small?  So be it. It’s the way of the world, apparently.

Here’s what I believe happened. This is not based on anything I can provide links to, just my opinion. Joe Biden wasn’t going to run for re-election but then started re-thinking it when he realized how devastating it would be if we lost to Trump in 2024. I believe that he believed he was the only one who could beat Trump. I don’t think this was ego. I think it was clear he was the only one who could do it and Republicans thought so too because they were doing their best to destroy him. He had already beaten Trump once. He has said on recent interviews he believes he would have won and I have no reason to doubt that. In 2020 Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes. And this time he would have been running as the incumbent President of the United States.

Yes yes I know, there was polling the media couldn’t stop talking about 24-7, and he sometimes looked kind of frail (which the media made sure we saw).  Then everyone freaked out during the debate because as a sane person, Biden kind of froze up trying to come up with an on the spot coherent response to Trump’s insane gibberish on the debate stage.

Democrats panicked and saw all of this through the eyes of Fox News. I’m not saying they watch Fox News necessarily, just that right wing propaganda being dominant in our media ecosystem, it’s sometimes hard even for us to not see things through their eyes, how we know they will frame it. I find myself doing it all the time. Propaganda doesn’t just divide people, it divides brains.

So what do Democrats say following the debate?  Not how impossibly, unspeakably bad it would be to have a man like Trump in the White House again, which would have been a super easy case to make.  What do Democrats do?  Have his back, point at how insane Trump’s ramblings were?  Nope. Seemed like it didn’t even occur to the smart party leaders, to be like hey what would happen if we all just had his back and pointed out what a good job he’d been doing and how horrible Trump would be, so horrible Liz Cheney a fellow Republican toured the country telling anyone who would listen that we would not survive a second Trump presidency. And she was drawing huge crowds for this, even in Iowa.  And so far, just past Trump’s first 100 days, she could still be right. It is not at all clear democracy will survive four years of Trump.

No, we decide that Biden was the one who was unacceptable, “awful” in fact, I saw one Iowa state senator post on Twitter. Real helpful. Never mind that he was sick that night and probably taking a cold medicine known to temporarily hamper cognitive functioning particularly in old people. Where was that famous democratic empathy for our president? Nowhere to be found.  I was sick at heart when I saw some Iowa Democrats, local electeds and candidates for congress, publicly call for Biden to step down as if it was any of their business or as if it would help their campaigns. All the cool kids were doing it.

Listening to DC consultants is something that will hopefully, change as Ken Martin and the current DNC leadership are committing an unprecedented amount of money to state parties going forward. That is a good change for our party.

But I digress.

As Ann Selzer has pointed out in a different conversational context, most polls are commissioned by media companies looking for a certain slant, story, or a continuation of a narrative that gets them the most eyeballs.  I believe the media went after Biden because he called out White House press corps and national reporters for doing a crappy job.  They deserved it and they knew it. But they got defensive and punished him for it. And Democrats did not have his back. They said he should stop “picking fights” with the media.

Howard Dean went down the same way. It wasn’t the scream, as everyone thinks, although that helped. It was the fact that he stated on Hardball with Chris Matthews that his first act as president would be to break up big media.

The majority of Iowans including Republicans polled in 2022, said they did not want Chuck Grassley to run for U.S. Senate again because of his advanced age (Grassley is nine years older than Biden). We all know how that turned out.  Grassley won handily. Just because respondents answered that particular question that way, didn’t mean they weren’t going to vote for him. I believe Joe Biden would have won too. At very least, he had a better chance than Kamala Harris had having been thrown into the race at the last minute after an intra-party knock down drag out fight. I’m guessing millions of Americans could not even name the vice-president.

I knew when Biden announced he was stepping down we were going to lose. It was a loser move on our part. He did the right thing.  By then he had no choice. His party had turned against him. After everything he had done for the country, after Trump 1.0. we forced out a perfectly good president and risked electing Trump because we panicked and bought into a media narrative that was highly questionable.

Just goes to show you we can all be affected by the media whose best thing is making relatively minor issues huge and huge issues trivial. Are we all just sheep after all?

I’ll just say one more thing. All we needed was to get Biden over the finish line. Just get to November and after that, he could have stepped down if he was unable to do his job, which no one had been able to point to a single incident of him failing to do his job.

I’m still a loyal Democrat. I don’t feel cynical about our party. Democrats are well meaning people.  We all have our disappointments and disagreements with each other. I write this to document how I feel we get played by the media and in the hope it doesn’t happen again.

We now have an anti-democracy Trump regime to fight. But maybe moving forward we can benefit from the wisdom and humor of Trevor Noah who respects his elders.