The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, was much anticipated, heavily promoted and widely reviewed. It ended up as a three-day story. More than one person has said, “Why bother? We know what it’s about, and Democrats should be looking ahead, not behind.”

All that is true. But I am a political junkie, and I read it immediately. Tapper and Thompson did hundreds of interviews and provided myriad details of Biden’s decline and the circles of insiders who covered it up, in different ways and with different motivations. Was their “coverup” the “Original Sin,” as the authors imply, or was it the former President’s breaking his 2020 campaign pledge to be a “bridge to the future” and serve only one term? The book doesn’t give this critical reversal the attention it deserves and treads only lightly on Jill and Hunter’s role in convincing Biden to run again.

It should be noted up front that Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich,– full disclosure, the son of a dear friend – wrote in June of 2022 that Biden was too old to run for reelection.  To him the signs of decline were already there, and Leibovich was lambasted for his observation that (in my words) the emperor had no clothes. Tapper and Thompson don’t even mention Leibovich as an exception when criticizing how the media turned a blind eye.

According to Tapper and Thompson, some in Biden’s inner circle, known in the White House as “the Politburo,” were deluding themselves, in deep denial because, after all, Joe Biden had always been underestimated and, despite many setbacks, had always picked himself up and moved forward. Others bought into the party line despite their misgivings. As, eventually, did most Democratic Party officials.

Even seeing his decline, those in the White House focused only on his moments of clarity and capable decision-making, especially in areas of foreign policy. The insiders lightened his schedule, limited his availability to between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and persuaded themselves that only he could defeat Donald Trump.

The worst individuals were those like Mike Donilon, a close adviser to Biden for some four decades, who was paid an outrageous $4 million to leave the White House to be chief strategist for the ill-fated 2024 reelection campaign. (Did he have a financial incentive to keep up the charade?) Again, according to the authors, it was he who, knowing that a Biden loss was inevitable, purposely kept the polling data from the President, laundering the reports from three outside polling firms showing how consistently behind Biden was, feeding him “spin,” and working to discredit journalists who raised questions about the President’s deterioration.

Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who thought Biden too old from 2020 to 2023 grew from 34 percent to more than 75 percent. The percentage of those who questioned his mental acuity jumped from 45 percent to 62 percent. And that was before the catastrophic debate of June 2024!   The most resistance to the truth may have come from Democrats in the U.S. Senate, long the geriatric wing of the legislative branch of government. A few House members, Seth Moulton, for example, spoke out.

And we should remember Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips’ last-ditch effort to get another Democrat to run in the primary as an alternative to Biden. Phillips first tried to get high-visibility governors (like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, who wouldn’t even take his phone calls). When everyone demurred, he put his political career on the line, only to be frozen out by party poohbahs and dismissed by the media. He was a blue canary in the mine shaft and deserves better than the calumny he received.

At a time when 72 percent of the electorate thought Biden should neither run nor serve, no one – especially not the insiders – walked into the Oval Office to tell him the truth. His lateness to bow out left no time for a primary process or for a replacement candidate to run a viable campaign. We don’t have to re-litigate Kamala Harris’s 107-day campaign here.

The troubling reality was how Democrats could berate Trump as a serial liar when they were repeatedly lying to themselves and to the public.  As a result, they let down their party, their country and democracy itself. Another blow to the public trust!

In the future, history may well give Joe Biden full credit for having achieved an enormously successful legislative record, bringing us through the worst pandemic in a century, and restoring Trump-frayed alliances abroad. For now, we are left pondering how to require Presidents and challengers alike to be transparent about their physical and mental competencies, as determined by independent physicians committed to identifying and revealing hard truths for the good of the country. Those doctors who fail to tell the complete truth should be charged with perjury. Absent this, the best prospects for accountability are an independent news media and political insiders committed to telling the truth, before the post mortem disclosures. One or two lone voices won’t do it. Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.