SAUNDERS: Where’s Joe? The disappearing, diminished Biden presidency

WASHINGTON

The Wall Street Journal ran a story Thursday under the banner, “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge.” Tuesday’s New York Times story, “A Weary Biden Heads For the Exit,” told a similar tale, as departing staffers have starting spilling the beans.

If this were a game of “Tell me something I didn’t know,” Big Media would lose.

If you follow the news, you’ve seen Biden shuffling across the White House lawn or looking lost at the end of the diminishing number of POTUS public events. Sadly, after he bowed out of the 2024 campaign, Biden appears to have lost interest in the job.

Over the past week, as a partial government shutdown loomed, Biden has been conspicuously inconspicuous.

At Friday’s press briefing, where budget negotiations were discussed, a reporter asked Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “The strategy is, he is leading by staying in the background?”

Earlier this month, Biden, 82, appeared to fall asleep during a summit with African leaders in Angola.

The White House announced Thursday that next month Biden will travel to Rome to meet with His Holiness Pope Francis, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

What could go wrong?

No joke.

In February, when Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on his investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified material, Hur opined that Biden could not be convicted in court by a jury that would see the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

And Biden isn’t working as hard as he used to. CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller, the non-official bean counter of presidential events, has tallied nine Biden Cabinet meetings, compared to 19 Cabinet meets for the first terms of President Barack Obama and 25 for Donald Trump.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dealt regularly with Biden during his first two years in office, the Journal reported, but much less so during the second half of Biden’s term, when Russia’s war on Ukraine and Hamas’ attacks in Gaza dominated international news.

I didn’t see Biden’s lack of interest coming.

Throughout his career, Biden had his eye on the Oval Office. He ran for the world’s highest office in 1988 and 2008, but he did not catch fire.

In 2008, however, Biden got a win when Obama chose his Delaware Senate compatriot to be his running mate. When his vice presidency was coming to an end in 2016, Biden wanted to run for the White House, but Obama persuaded his wingman to sit out the race so Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could head the ticket. That plan did not work out as intended.

So Biden ran again in 2020, and he won after he sold his candidacy as a moderate, one-term transition after Trump.

But when it came time to let go and make room for another Democrat, Biden resisted. In the aftermath of his June debate disaster, it took former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, now 84, to persuade Biden to take a hard look at polls and bow out.

Many Democrats believe that Trump won a second term because Biden didn’t get out in time. Now The Man Who Wouldn’t Leave seems to have lost interest in governing. Sort of like House Republicans.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.