If Joe Biden Really Loved America...

Put yourself in Joe Biden’s shoes. I think he wears a size 10 EE (double E for oversized ego).

You have wanted to be President of the United States since you were sitting on your father’s knee in Scranton (Joey, stop sniffing your sister’s hair) and engaging in turf wars with your old nemesis Corn Pop in Wilmington. After being elected a U.S. senator at the tender age of 29, you start currying favor with party insiders including avowed racists like Robert Byrd and even Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond.

Bent on becoming the second youngest president ever elected, you run for the Oval Office in 1988. Your political ambition is so all-consuming that you plagiarize speeches from Robert F. Kennedy, JFK, Hubert Humphrey, and even Neil Kinnock, a British Labor Party leader. Your fledgling campaign goes up in smoke when the allegations are made public, and you withdraw in disgrace.

Twenty years later, you decide to try again, hoping that everyone has forgotten the 1988 debacle. However, you fail to win a single primary or to collect a single delegate. Instead, because of your so-called foreign policy experience (former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates would later torpedo that assertion) and Senate connections, you are invited to be Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, a man you once described as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

No thanks to you, Obama defeats an aging John McCain in 2008 and four years later, the robotic Mitt Romney. Instead of endorsing you for president in 2016 as his hand-picked successor, Obama throws his weight behind Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign. You figure that 2020 is your last shot at your lifelong obsession, so you run yet again. Like he did in 2016, Obama refuses to endorse you, preferring to sit on the sidelines and even offering you some personal advice: “Joe, you don’t have to do this.”

You do it anyway and after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, your campaign is on life support. Credit Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) for literally resurrecting your chances with a last-minute endorsement that swung the Palmetto State’s black voters your way.

The Covid pandemic allows you to hide in your basement bunker and run a shadow campaign, keeping your dementia-driven gaffes to a minimum. Thanks to Donald Trump portraying a blustering bully in your first debate, a boatload of B-vitamins, and some election night shenanigans, you manage to eke out a narrow win in November to become the 46th President of the United States.

Now, having finally arrived atop the political Mount Olympus, you face the greatest physical and mental challenge of your life at the same time that you body and your brain are starting to betray you. Your handlers do their very best to keep you away from the media as you conduct the fewest press conferences in modern presidential history while only taking questions from a few hand-selected reporters. And yet, on those occasions when the curtain is pulled away, you are revealed to be exactly who the Hur report says you are, “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t remember the years you served as a senator or the vice president. Perhaps most alarmingly, you couldn’t recall – within several years – when your son Beau died.

You come out bragging that you have been exonerated by the report when, in actuality, you weren’t prosecuted because of your physical and cognitive frailty. So, mad as a hornet, you decide to show the world that you are as energetic and competent as ever. Unfortunately, you come across as an angry and bitter old man who can’t remember the name of the church where your son’s funeral was held. And that stilted walk away from the podium stuck a fork in your claims of virility.

The jig is up, and everyone now knows that your apparent cognitive decline is a real thing. Behind-the-scenes murmurs become out-in-the-open discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment. Your back is to the wall and everyone but you and Jill, your power-hungry and elder-abusing wife, are willing to admit it.

So, what do you do? Any reasonable adult would admit that they aren’t up to the task of serving as America’s Commander-in-Chief. After all, there is no shame in dementia… just in refusing to acknowledge that it is occurring. You can take the high road, exiting as a noble and sympathetic figure like Ronald Reagan did in his farewell letter to the American people following his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Or, selfishly and shamefully, you can vainly try to refute the obvious while simultaneously imperiling your party’s chances in November – and the nation as a whole. Will you put your country above yourself… or will you cling to the reins of power until they are pried from your arthritic hands?

Only you know the answer, Joe. So far, it looks like you plan to ride this thing out as if it were the common cold. Sadly for you, lots of rest, plenty of fluids, and Vitamin C won’t cure – or even delay – dementia. And so, you seem hell-bent on taking America down with you.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Witmer, Kamala Harris, and a host of other presidential aspirants are checking your pulse and licking their chops. I even heard that Hillary Clinton is starting to weigh in on the subject.

There are two people who often refuse to exit gracefully and at the top of their respective games. The first is professional athletes and the second is politicians. In 1951, the New York Yankees offered Joe DiMaggio a $100,000 contract for the 1952 season, but he turned it down flat, opting to retire instead. When asked why, one of his closest friends said, “He knows he can’t be Joe DiMaggio anymore.” In other words, the “Yankee Clipper” sensed that his skills were starting to diminish, and he wanted to go out on top before he tarnished his legacy and embarrassed himself.

Conversely, Muhammad Ali retired and unretired multiple times, ending his career with a series of lopsided losses to boxers he would have pummeled in his prime. Everyone knew that the punch-drunk Ali was no longer “The Greatest” except him and his enablers. As a result of taking too many left jabs to the head and right hooks to the chin, Ali later developed Parkinson’s disease and died a crippled old man unable to communicate verbally.

Don’t go out that way, Joe. Have some dignity and do what is right for America.