by David Bossie
In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous “malaise” speech in which he laid out all the daunting challenges facing our nation, the president said that America was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.”
Fast-forward 45 years and our country is once again facing a crisis of confidence, this time under the failed leadership of President Joe Biden.
The uncertainty Americans are feeling due to the radical Biden agenda and the problems it has caused like crushing inflation, high interest rates, the open border crisis and weakness on the world stage has been a huge drag on the White House and Biden re-election campaign for a long time. But now, after a series of missteps, an overwhelming majority of Americans are also questioning this elderly president’s fitness for office and wondering if he’s healthy enough to discharge his duties as our commander-in-chief for the next five years.
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s final report covering his investigation into Biden’s decades-long mishandling of classified records shocked the nation with its troubling descriptions of our 81-year-old president’s deteriorating memory. The report stated in no uncertain terms that President Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended … and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began.”
During the course of the interview, the president wondered aloud, “if it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president” and “in 2009, am I still vice president?” The Hur report gave the American people a rare unscripted look behind the scenes of the least transparent president in our nation’s history and what was discovered can only be described as frightening and disqualifying.
It appears that the incumbent president — who is asking Americans to give him another four year term in office — could not recall that he was elected and re-elected vice president of the United States in 2008 and 2012 or that he served in that office from 2009 to 2017.
The questions about Biden’s mental acuity and cognitive decline have been swirling around since he decided to run for president in 2019. As we all know, then-candidate Biden used the COVID-19 lockdowns as an excuse to run his 2020 campaign for president from his basement in Delaware.
Biden took full advantage of the new rules so he could do as little campaigning as possible and limit his exposure to media questions and self-inflicted gaffes on the campaign trail. The president’s political allies in the mainstream media willingly gave him a free pass from start to finish and now we’re all paying the price for that inexcusable dereliction of duty.
So, what began years ago as stalwarts in the conservative media pointing out the obvious — that Biden had lost a step — is now to the point that nearly everyone in America is acknowledging the rapidly declining president and questioning whether he is a threat to U.S. national security. For example, recent survey data shows that an astonishing 86% of the American people believe that President Biden is too old to serve another term in the Oval Office, including 73% of Democrats and 91% of Independents.
The Democrat brain trust in Washington has every right to be hitting the panic button over the public’s view of President Biden’s mental state and what if anything can be done about it. The strategy of having the president do more public events and photo ops is not going to solve the problem for two reasons.
One, Biden is going to keep making awful verbal mistakes and showing acute feebleness by simply trying to walk on stage without falling. And secondly, after three long years, the American people have already seen enough weakness and made up their minds that the president is unfit to serve four more years with his finger on the nuclear button.
We are truly in uncharted waters here and it would be a mistake for anyone to dismiss the gravity of the situation — including the White House press secretary. Since Joe Biden is refusing to pass the torch to another Democrat, his team must prove to the American people beyond a reasonable doubt that their elderly candidate is in full control of his faculties.
One option for the Biden campaign — and the media should demand this — is to have the president submit to a thorough and fully transparent cognitive and physical examination that the American people can trust. The doctors who conduct the tests would have to release full unedited results to the public and conduct a press conference to answer all the necessary questions.
Absent a move like this, Biden is going to lose to former President Donald Trump because it’s obvious to just about everyone that his leftist agenda has failed and he’s not up to the job anymore.
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David N. Bossie is president of Citizens United, and he served as deputy campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President in 2016. @David_Bossie @Citizens_United
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden.
