What Did the Democrats Know, and When Did They Know It?

Opinion|What Did the Democrats Know, and When Did They Know It?

In the summer of 1973, in the thick of Watergate, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee posed a memorable question about Richard Nixon: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The answer turned out to be, to put it charitably, quite a lot and early on.

After every presidential election, journalists rush to write books on the campaign that was — covering primaries and conventions, voters and polls, strategies and infighting. But books about the 2024 race also prompt a new variation on Baker’s question: What did the Democrats know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental decline, and when did they know it? And, if historical appropriation permits a corollary: Once they knew, why didn’t more of them speak out about it?

The answer to the first question, once again, appears to be quite a lot and early on. The answer to the second is more complicated, involving a mix of denial, partisanship, political calculation and the peculiar blindness that results from family lore and political mythology. The result is a unique category of campaign book, about the race that was until it suddenly wasn’t — and about a political party eager to find a scapegoat, in the form of one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., for its electoral troubles.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” is already the big political book of the moment, even before its formal May 20 publication. (For a summary, see the subtitle: “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”) The authors depict a Democratic Party, a White House staff and a Biden campaign that, though aware to varying degrees of the weakness, forgetfulness, confusion and incoherence afflicting Biden, remained largely silent about it, opting instead to accommodate and rationalize. And they describe a president and inner circle so enamored with the Biden mythology — defiant against tough odds, resilient against adversity, solely capable of vanquishing Donald Trump — that any skepticism was forbidden.

In an authors’ note, Tapper and Thompson highlight the book’s 200 sources — lots of lawmakers and campaign and administration insiders — most of whom agreed to talk to them only after the election. “Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Many were angry and felt deeply betrayed, not just by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies and his family.” In campaign books, guilt, blame and not-my-fault-ism are standard impulses of the losing side.

“Original Sin” is not definitive on when Biden’s diminishment began, except to say that signs were frequent and spanned several years, often seeming to worsen around periods of family turmoil. For some, it started in earnest in 2015, with the passing of the president’s eldest son. “Beau’s death wrecked him,” one senior White House aide tells the authors. “Part of him died that never came back after Beau died.” The later legal troubles surrounding Biden’s son Hunter — particularly the collapse of a 2023 deal on tax and gun charges — also proved an “inflection point,” Tapper and Thompson write, citing Biden aides, “where the president suddenly and steeply declined.”