Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press, 352 pages)

By Paul Markowitz

With the election of 2024 still in our rear-view mirror, it is appropriate and timely that we reconsider what we knew and when we knew it about the decline of Joe Biden prior to last year's election. Although Trump's deficiencies may be well-known, they seem to be impervious to public concern all but proving his contention that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without any undue consequences.

In Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book Original Sin, they contend that Joe Biden's cognitive decline and his campaign's effort to conceal it from the public during the 2024 campaign, all but ensured the demise of his presidency when a live debate would put a dagger in the heart of his re-election chances and severely hamper his successor's chances as well.

The event that brought the situation into perspective for those beyond the inner circle was the blockbuster fundraiser held on June 15th with celebrities galore. The event was co-sponsored by George Clooney and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Unfortunately, Biden had just returned from a G-7 summit overseas and it had been an exhausting week for the aging President. When Clooney saw Biden, he was shocked by the appearance of a man that he had known for years and even more so by the fact that Biden didn't seem to recognize Clooney at all. An aide in fact had to remind the President who Clooney was despite the President knowing him for many years. The same was so for Jon Favreau, Obama's chief speech writer.

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg did a yeoman's job, going above and beyond in assisting Biden behind the scenes as to debate preparation and campaign videos. Yet Biden was so in denial that a day after the election, he felt that the elites, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, et al, had pushed him out of a race he would have won. Only Biden felt this way without any credible evidence.

David Plouffe, who had served as Obama's campaign manager in 2008 and senior advisor until 2013, was drafted to help Harris. But he claimed that a shortened hundred- and seven-day race was untenable. Biden's waiting nearly three weeks after the debate to drop out only added to the dilemma. The problem was not his age but his cognitive decline which had only gotten worse throughout his presidency. What the public saw was of concern but what was going on in private was worse. He could reasonably make daily decisions but there was a limit to the hours he could reasonably function without beginning to freeze up and or lose his train of thought. But until the end of his Presidency, Biden and those closest to him refused to admit the serious decline in his energy, cognitive abilities and communication skills. On June 27th the debate against Trump made all the problems public for everyone to see. By refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he all but guaranteed the outcome.

There were signs earlier on but there was always a reason to disavow their conclusion. The special counsel Robert Hur's report that called Biden "an elderly man with a poor memory” could be discarded as a "right wing hack job" despite its authenticity. When Biden gave a rousing State of the Union address, everyone felt optimistic again.

No doubt there will be many who will attack the book because it gives some credibility to Trump's election. Yet a total unwillingness to deal with the facts that his inner circle left the Presidency in a terribly vulnerable position - a vulnerable enough of a position that a face-to-face debate would put an end to Biden's reelection chances as it most assuredly did. Waiting another three weeks did not help much.

Although the title of the book, Original Sin, suggests an error of biblical proportions, for many the outcome of the election and its cataclysmic consequences might make the analogy valid.

Paul Markowitz is a California-based writer