When my mom got into her 80s, we had to deal with periodic medical issues. Fainting. Falls. Broken bones.
Luckily, she was in good stead with the local rescue squad because she faithfully attended their crab feast fundraisers.
Each time, my siblings and I would move heaven and earth to get her home from whatever hospital she had landed in.
In 2003, I tried to talk one emergency room doctor into releasing her after 11 hours.
“I’ll let her out if she can tell me who the president is,” the doctor said.
We both looked at my mom, expectantly.
“George,” she said.
I was thrilled; W, it was.
“George Washington,” she finished.
After each episode, I’d proudly tell her internist, Dr Simon, how we had nursed her back to health.
At last, he said with exasperation: “You don’t understand. Picture your mother hanging off a ledge, holding on by five fingers. After one of these incidents, she’s hanging on by four fingers. Another incident, three fingers. And so on. You think you’ve gotten her through and you’re starting fresh, but you’re not. It’s cumulative.”
My mom was a stubborn old bird, and she hung on with two fingers, and then one, until she was 97. We gave her morphine at the end, with a bourbon chaser.
I know that octogenarians and nonagenarians can keep their wits about them. My mom was sharp and funny into her 90s. But I also know they begin losing threads of the narrative, and it’s as painful to them as it is to those who care about them.
At some point, older people find themselves on that ledge. And, as Dr Simon taught me, each traumatic incident you pull through just leads to another.
President Joe Biden is now trying to prove he can hang on without falling and taking the House, Senate and democracy with him.
After his debate malfunction, Biden tried to start afresh, first an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, then a news conference Thursday night, next an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday.
He is promising to curb his schedule to get more rest, while careering around the country and the world to prove he has stamina.
His gymnastics – showing he can walk and talk in a way that instils confidence – fill me with sadness. Every stumble and tumble will now be treated as if it’s a constitutional crisis.
As The New York Times’ Annie Karni reported, the president pushed back in a call last Friday with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, when Rep. Mike Levin, a vulnerable California Democrat, told Biden he needed to move aside.
“That’s why I’m going out and letting people touch me, poke me, ask me questions,” the president replied. “I think I know what I’m doing.”
Pretty lame that a president needs to be poked to show he’s with it.
At a moment when Biden should be getting hosannas for his good work and becoming the party paterfamilias, his team is sniping at Democratic luminaries like Barack Obama and George Clooney.
The Biden crew is hectoring journalists to leave the president alone and explain how awful Donald Trump is. I have used every damning word in the thesaurus, thrice, about Trump. And I’ll invent some new ones if I have to. (Suggestions welcome.) But it is not my fault if 2016 Hillary Clinton and 2024 Biden are unable to prosecute the case against a candidate with as many psychoses and felonies as Trump. It’s theirs.
Biden’s new campaign tack is lashing out at elites, which is silly. You can’t trash elites when you’re the president. And he loves the regard of elites. The media elites on “Morning Joe” are serving as his de facto campaign managers and spindoctors.
In the hour he spent with reporters on Thursday, Biden was so busy proving he was compos mentis that he didn’t attack Trump as an existential threat. Instead, he talked about all the elites, from historians to Nobel laureate economists, who approved of him.
People in the White House compare it to a submarine; they have a hard time fathoming what’s going on in the country, even though they’re in the nation’s nerve centre.
At the news conference, the captain of the submarine went into a weird whisper, saying that he wouldn’t get out of the race unless his team “came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win’. Me. No one is saying that. No poll says that”.
Biden’s party, his allies and some of his staffers are in a panic about his numbers, congressional desertions, donor defections. With his polls lagging in battleground states and some blue states looking purplish, Biden has a larger battlefield with less money, and stamina, to cover it.
He is oblivious or in denial, bolstered by his wife Jill and son’s Hunter’s self-interested fantasies.
Jill should come to her senses, protect her husband from the humiliations to come and repeat the trick of 2004 that made her feelings clear about a possible presidential run.
She walked into the room at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, where advisers were imploring her husband to get into the race, wearing a halter top with the word “No” scrawled on her belly. Joe got the message.
Biden is hanging on to a ledge with an ever-weakening grip.
You can’t outrun Father Time.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times on Saturday, July 13th.
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