Michael Isikoff titled his excellent 1999 memoir Uncovering Clinton. As I recall — I am writing from memory because I gave my copy of the book to a departed friend — the title punned on a striking theme of the book. Isikoff uncovered the Lewinsky story while everyone in the press knew about Bill Clinton’s frolics and detours — everyone including Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry — but the press chose not to cover the story. As to the Lewinsky story, Matt Drudge forced their hand.
A prominent journalist who covered the 1992 Clinton campaign confirmed Isikoff’s theme in conversation with me a while back. Traveling on the Clinton campaign plane, he saw Clinton snap his head around to follow an attractive flight attendant after she walked by and then posed a rhetorical question to the reporters: “Did you see that?” They all knew.
Mark Halperin is the proprietor of the Wide World of News site and the informative 2WAY platform on YouTube. He is also a merciless critic of the dereliction of the press’s noncoverage of Biden’s decline. Mark says he first noted Biden’s struggles with cognition in 2017 and was relieved that Biden held no high political office at the time.
By the time that Biden was giving a shout out to a deceased congresswoman in 2022 — “Where’s Jackie?” — he thought the press might long since have taken notice of the issue if it were doing its job as traditionally understood. He thinks that the press would have insisted on hearing from Biden’s personal physician rather than being shielded from him if it were something other than a partisan adjunct (my words, not his).
A trusted source saw Biden speak at Dartmouth in 2019 as he campaigned in Hanover. At that time my source met the Washington Post theater critic — Peter Marks — who was reviewing the candidates’ performances on the stump. In “Joe Biden can’t stop running” (July 25, 2019), Marks assessed Biden campaigning in Iowa. Marks observed that “as Biden went through the routine paces of the campaign, you became keenly aware of his intense desire to prove he’s not in any way past his prime.” Marks noted that he could see Biden fighting a losing battle:
Some of that torch-bearing air of vitality had gone out of Biden’s performance by the time he got to Marshalltown later in the afternoon. The morning of bobbing and weaving in the parade seemed to have left him tuckered out. And not even the spirited audience warm-up by his wife could provide much of an adrenaline boost.
Standing at the rostrum at a Best Western inn on South Center Street, he read his speech, rather flatly, off a teleprompter again. It was a medium-size meeting room of a modest hotel just off U.S. Route 30, where the capacity crowd of heartland folk waited to be propelled out of their seats by invigorating rhetoric — or at the very least, by a dose of magnetic, plain-spoken Uncle Joe. Instead, it got a lot of canned campaign-speak from Politician Joe.
My source tells me that Marks said he thought Biden had dementia. It is nevertheless difficult to detect any hint of it peeking through his story. (Marks left the Post after a buyout earlier this year. I was unable to reach him for comment. If he reads this and wants to comment, please write me via the “Email Us” at the top of our home page.)
Now comes the Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor Bob Woodward with a new book that takes up the issue of Biden’s visible decline. In the passage below, Woodward cites the observation of my youngest daughter’s father-in-law (Bill Reichblum) and grandfather-in-law (former Ambassador Alfred Moses). Like Halperin, Bill and Ambassador Moses saw the signs of Biden’s senility up close.
Woodward writes: “I would learn the significance of these fundraisers as early markers [sic] of Biden’s decline only a year later, in June 2024.”
Woodward is half of the duo that purportedly uncovered the Watergate scandal (but see Ed Epstein’s classic Commentary essay “Did the press uncover Watergate?”). The Washington Post employs a large staff of political reporters, columnists, and editors. Coverage of the presidency is central to its mission. If I understand correctly, we are to believe that no one at the Post staff itself noticed Biden’s senility before these Biden donors in 2023.
What a complete and utter farce. Biden, by the way, is scheduled to remain president of the United States until January 20, 2025.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/uncovering-biden.php
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