Since the 27 June Presidential debate, the country and world have seen a rapid reorientation to the conventional wisdom that Joe Biden is in some sense senile. This collapse of an implicit belief about the President’s capacity and the establishment of a new consensus reality has been fascinating to watch and it is worth examination both as a phenomenon with practical implications for our understanding of American politics and as a case study in the nature and stability of social epistemology.
Hoocoodanode?
There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.
— Croaker, The Black Company
Hoocoodanode, or “who could have known” in longform, was a phrase pioneered by financial blogger Bill McBride in 2008 during his coverage of the financial crisis. He had ample opportunity to use it in criticizing the scores of macroeconomists and bulge bracket dons who were caught without swimsuits after the tide went out and left scrambling to explain their failure to see impending disaster despite their credentials and purported expertise. And he was justified in doing so, because he and his co-blogger Tanta had been incredibly critical of practices in housing finance for years. Tanta especially earned belated fame for pieces like this one excoriating in highly specific terms the practices that would bring down the global economy years hence.1
Like the Financial Crisis, the contemporary crisis has spurred soul searching among its casualties about how this could have happened—about who should have known. What’s remarkable about this case is that, as far as I can tell, the people most directly victimized are the only ones asking this question, because everyone who cared to be aware was in no way surprised.
I believe that people didn’t know because they didn’t want to.
The Best News Reporters in Washington
Ben Smith, writing at Semafor in a roundup of journalists’ self-recriminations:
It’s the biggest question for American journalism right now:
How could we have allowed our audience to be surprised about the basic condition of the number one reporting target in the country, the president?
. . . the most damning fact, to me, was Max’s observation that the press assembled in Atlanta gasped at Biden’s performance. How could we have been surprised?
How indeed.
A charitable response might be that a demonstration of infirmity by the head of state of the world’s hegemon is a shocking event. A less-charitable response is that perhaps the journalists Ben Smith is writing for, about, and among are incredibly bad at their purported jobs.
This is not a new observation. Ben Rhodes, an Obama deputy national security advisor responsible for “strategic communications,” had this to say in 2016 about his successful attempt to pull one over on Americans by lying to the press:2
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Emphasis mine. And this really seems to be the case: the journalists who are shocked apparently weren’t even reading their fellow journalists.
The Record of Newspapers
I want to emphasize that Biden’s senility has been apparent in published news media for some time. I don’t think any of this evidence is dispositive, but it should be enough to cause anyone who is paying attention to at least wonder if, perhaps, there might be something to the notion that Biden is declining.
Consider this selection of stories; all emphases mine.
Wall Street Journal, less than a month before the debate:
When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.
Nor was this the first case of reporting by a flagship newspaper. New York Times, 2022:
But they acknowledged Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans. His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.
Although White House officials insist they make no special accommodations the way Reagan’s team did . . . [h]e stays out of public view at night and has taken part in fewer than half as many news conferences or interviews as recent predecessors.
But the signs were there for those with eyes to see even earlier. The Washington Examiner, in 2020, before Biden was even elected:
The presidential election is 40 days away, and Joe Biden is running an absentee campaign.
The Democratic presidential nominee called a campaign lid once again this morning, meaning he won’t be making any public appearances for the entire day. Biden has disappeared before noon Eastern time on nine of the first 24 days of September.
The Examiners’ coverage continued into Biden’s administration, until apparently everyone simply became accustomed to his absenteeism:
The White House called a “lid” at 1:13 p.m. on Monday, signaling President Biden was not due to make any public appearances during the rest of the day despite growing questions about the emergency at the border, his administration’s commitment to transparency, and his work rate.
You may say: the Washington Examiner? That trash tabloid? And to that I would reply: even that trash tabloid saw this coming a mile away. It is bizarre for a Presidential candidate to simply not appear in public.
Other, more mainstream outlets have commented regularly on Biden’s absence. Associated Press via NPR, 2022:
As Biden wraps up his first year in the White House, he has held fewer news conferences than any of his five immediate predecessors at the same point in their presidencies, and he has taken part in fewer media interviews than any of his recent predecessors.
The dynamic has left the White House facing questions about whether the president, who vowed to have the most transparent administration in the nation’s history, is falling short in pulling back the curtain on how his administration operates and missing opportunities to explain his agenda to Americans.
Most strikingly, you may or may not recall that in February of this year, a special counsel declined to issue federal charges against Biden for mishandling classified documents. Summary from The Hill:
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
( . . . )
Hur cited Biden’s 2017 conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, which Hur described as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur wrote.
I won’t even get into Trump-side claims of Biden’s senility, which the Biden administration never ever bothered to rebut with credible evidence:
“The overall read is stability,” said Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
( . . . )
It was notable, however, that there was no cognitive portion of the report, Reiner said. Current guidelines do not necessarily suggest a routine cognitive exam for an 81-year-old, he said, unless it is recommended by the patient, caregiver, or physician because of a cognitive issue.
“The other reason to test him would be a political reason,” Reiner said. “There very well may be a political reason since it’s been so high on everyone’s radar screen. But apparently they didn’t feel it was warranted. But that’s the glaring absence from the report.”
There were prodigies and portents enough.
Stand and Deliver
How could it possibly be that journalists, while journalists were regularly publishing stories about claims of Biden’s mental decline, somehow emerged shocked when in fact Biden seemed to demonstrate symptoms of mental decline? Let’s first let the journalists speak for themselves.
Megan McArdle at WaPo claims that talking about this would lead to social opprobrium:
And fair enough! But that opprobrium wasn’t enough to keep journalists from publishing articles at places like WSJ or NYT; and it seems impossible to me that it could stop a journalist from retreating to his loft and reading such stories in the dark, under a blanket, safe from people yelling at them for learning about the world.
Jill Abramson, former executive editor of NYT, laments that
It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.
Obviously, the President’s decline was a super hard story to report, even by those who wanted to get it, like the WSJ. Their story did not deliver, using mostly named GOP sources.
She’s not answering the question of why she was shocked, or why journalists were shocked. Maybe they didn’t get a kill shot; fine. She was aware of the reporting; she can make inferences; why didn’t she connect the dots?
Overall I haven’t found reflection by journalists lucid, but
examines his own surprise with typical care and self-awareness. Excerpts:So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.
and
But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.
I’m still confused what those elites were thinking.
I frankly admire Scott and I feel bad about poking at his honest mea culpa, but I’m left with few other options because the alternatives from journalists are just trash. What strikes me about his teardown is that he was tripped up with assumptions and missed information that seem way below his usual level of analytic operation; I mean this as a compliment.3
My tentative conclusion from all of this is just that everyone here was socially or otherwise imprisoned and so prevented from putting two and two together even privately. All of the evidence was plain to see; or at least enough to not be shocked by what happened last Thursday. What was wanting was the capacity to perceive it.
There are some beliefs held for utility, and some load-bearing for survival; if they were to be abandoned, one would have to surrender their convenience, their security, or an identity. These are real costs.
Better Epistemics through Gnosis
Ben Smith, at the beginning of the Semafor piece, makes one telling mistake. He frames his post with the following question:
How could we have allowed our audience to be surprised about the basic condition of the number one reporting target in the country, the president?
I personally find this projection to be offensive, and indeed, Smith gives up the game three grafs later:
But the most damning fact, to me, was Max’s observation that the press assembled in Atlanta gasped at Biden’s performance. How could we have been surprised?
I was not surprised. I am on record as wondering about whether Biden is functionally senile since at least March of 2020. (link, link, link trust me I knew what I was doing, link).
How did I get it right? Well, I’ll tell you.
It’s not that I just read and retained all those stories I linked near the top of this article, and developed the suspicion that the behavior of the Biden administration was more consistent with “people who were desperately propping up a superannuated meal ticket with the help of a credulous press corps” than it was with “people working for a once-in-a-century dynamo.”
But that wasn’t the true source of my power.
Well?
The secret is my God I mean Biden was coming up on eighty years old! Have you ever met or known eighty year olds? Even if they don’t get a diagnosis, even if their minds aren’t totally lost to us, the fact is octogenarians are just in a phase of their lives where they are meaningfully slowing down both mentally and physically.
I don’t have any idea what base rates are. I just saw some videos of Biden looking and shuffling like a typical eighty year old and thought “yup it’s reasonable to guess he’s probably in decline right now.”
This is the easiest empirical exercise imaginable. If you are trying to evaluate whether an eighty year old man is senility-adjacent for the purposes of holding high office the burden of proof ought to be on the people making the case that he is not. If the best they can offer is “trust us,” you can reasonably conclude that (1) they’re lying to you, and (2) they think you’re enough of a sucker to buy it. Apparently this was sufficient for the elite press.
The context of the Presidency matters here. I genuinely imagine that Biden is probably fine for playing nine holes a leisurely pace, no matter what Trump says; or for avoiding playing with the granddaughter he refuses to acknowledge. But effectively managing a Presidential administration would be a challenge for anyone in prime condition. He was able to dodge the spotlight for longer than I might have expected, but the debate rendered his incapacity for that role incontrovertible.
(I have a similar suspicion about Trump. He’s not as sharp as he was in 2016, however sharp that may have been; even in 2020 he had slowed down.)
I do not believe that this is an entirely rarefied position to have held going into the June 27 debate. Even my famously dumb Twitter followers, of all political stripes, managed to produce the following result in April of 2020 when asked about the matter:
The fact that so many got it so wrong, many of whom are genuinely sharp in their domains, indicates not a diabolical lie nor an absence of evidence, but a failure to see.
Appendix: Two Parables and a Litany
If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
“Syrio Forel was first sword to the Sealord of Braavos, and are you knowing how that came to pass?”
“You were the finest swordsman in the city.”
“Just so, but why? Other men were stronger, faster, younger, why was Syrio Forel the best? I will tell you now.” He touched the tip of his little finger lightly to his eyelid. “The seeing, the true seeing, that is the heart of it.
“Hear me. The ships of Braavos sail as far as the winds blow, to lands strange and wonderful, and when they return their captains fetch queer animals to the Sealord’s menagerie. Such animals as you have never seen, striped horses, great spotted things with necks as long as stilts, hairy mouse-pigs as big as cows, stinging manticores, tigers that carry their cubs in a pouch, terrible walking lizards with scythes for claws. Syrio Forel has seen these things.
“On the day I am speaking of, the first sword was newly dead, and the Sealord sent for me. Many bravos had come to him, and as many had been sent away, none could say why. When I came into his presence, he was seated, and in his lap was a fat yellow cat. He told me that one of his captains had brought the beast to him, from an island beyond the sunrise. ‘Have you ever seen her like?’ he asked of me.
“And to him I said, ‘Each night in the alleys of Braavos I see a thousand like him,’ and the Sealord laughed, and that day I was named the first sword.”
Arya screwed up her face. “I don’t understand.”
Syrio clicked his teeth together. “The cat was an ordinary cat, no more. The others expected a fabulous beast, so that is what they saw. How large it was, they said. It was no larger than any other cat, only fat from indolence, for the Sealord fed it from his own table. What curious small ears, they said. Its ears had been chewed away in kitten fights. And it was plainly a tomcat, yet the Sealord said ‘her,’ and that is what the others saw. Are you hearing?”
“Could the bears ever be defeated, lorek?”
“No.”
“Or tricked, maybe?”
He stopped gnawing and looked at her directly. Then he said, “You will never defeat the armored bears. You have seen my armor; now look at my weapons.” He dropped the meat and held out his paws, palm upward, for her to look at. Each black pad was covered in horny skin an inch or more thick, and each of the claws was as long as Lyra's hand at least, and as sharp as a knife. He let her run her hands over them wonderingly.
“One blow will crush a seal's skull,” he said. “Or break a man's back, or tear off a limb. And I can bite. If you had not stopped me in Trollesund, I would have crushed that man's head like an egg. So much for strength; now for trickery. You cannot trick a bear. You want to see proof? Take a stick and fence with me.”
Eager to try, she snapped a stick off a snow-laden bush, trimmed all the side shoots off, and swished it from side to side like a rapier. lorek Byrnison sat back on his haunches and waited, forepaws in his lap. When she was ready, she faced him, but she didn't like to stab at him because he looked so peaceable. So she flourished it, feinting to right and left, not intending to hit him at all, and he didn't move. She did that several times, and not once did he move so much as an inch.
Finally she decided to thrust at him directly, not hard, but just to touch the stick to his stomach. Instantly his paw reached forward and flicked the stick aside.
Surprised, she tried again, with the same result. He moved far more quickly and surely than she did. She tried to hit him in earnest, wielding the stick like a fencer's foil, and not once did it land on his body. He seemed to know what she intended before she did, and when she lunged at his head, the great paw swept the stick aside harmlessly, and when she feinted, he didn't move at all.
She became exasperated, and threw herself into a furious attack, jabbing and lashing and thrusting and stabbing, and never once did she get past those paws. They moved everywhere, precisely in time to parry, precisely at the right spot to block.
Finally she was frightened, and stopped. She was sweating inside her furs, out of breath, exhausted, and the bear still sat impassive. If she had had a real sword with a murderous point, he would have been quite unharmed. “I bet you could catch bullets,” she said, and threw the stick away. “How do you do that?”
“By not being human,” he said. “That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten.”
( . . . )
And it was going badly for Iorek now. He was limping; every time he put his left forepaw on the ground, they could see that it hardly bore his weight. He never used it to strike with, and the blows from his right hand were feebler, too, almost little pats compared with the mighty crushing buffets he'd delivered only a few minutes before.
Iofur had noticed. He began to taunt Iorek, calling him broken-hand, whimpering cub, rust-eaten, soon-to-die, and other names, all the while swinging blows at him from right and left which Iorek could no longer parry. Iorek had to move backward, a step at a time, and to crouch low under the rain of blows from the jeering bear-king.
Lyra was in tears. Her dear, her brave one, her fearless defender, was going to die, and she would not do him the treachery of looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned away.
So she looked, but her tears kept her from seeing what was really happening, and perhaps it would not have been visible to her anyway. It certainly was not seen by Iofur. Because Iorek was moving backward only to find clean dry footing and a firm rock to leap up from, and the useless left arm was really fresh and strong. You could not trick a bear, but, as Lyra had shown him, Iofur did not want to be a bear, he wanted to be a man; and Iorek was tricking him.
At last he found what he wanted: a firm rock deep-anchored in the permafrost. He backed against it, tensing his legs and choosing his moment. It came when Iofur reared high above, bellowing his triumph, and turning his head tauntingly toward Iorek's apparently weak left side.
That was when Iorek moved.
Sadly, Tanta was not able to fully enjoy spending her remaining years telling people “I told you so, you damned fools;” she passed in November 2008 at the age of 47. She was at least recognized with an NYT obit.
Thanks to @beddedanelson at twitter for reminding me of this.
Expanding. Scott didn’t have to publicly acknowledge that he realized was wrong, implicitly, about a belief he’d never discussed openly or even examined rigorously to himself. This is supererogatory-bordering-on-saintly epistemic hygiene.
How you change your evaluation his empirics is up to you, and of course it should depend on your baseline. Personally, I think I’m less somewhat less confident in his heuristic judgments than before; no change in his usual explicit and detailed analytics, which weren’t actually at play here and which I intuit use a distinct set of faculties. As far as his good faith goes, my belief in that remains fortified at its preexisting and very high level.
Perhaps part of what's happening here is that certain beliefs about the world become politically coded before there is actually enough data to make a judgment. Then, as data becomes available, it gets dismissed as misinformation, and if one were to believe it then that would undermine one's identity.
I think some of the same mechanisms were at play with beliefs about the origins of COVID and the safety/efficacy of the vaccines.
Great piece!
While I agree with you that journalists have failed us generally, I wonder what the local optimum might be in this case. Let's say you're a journalist and you want to break the "the president is senile" story. NYT won't publish it, WashPo won't publish it, WSJ might, but then NYT and WashPo and a thousand others will publish an article saying that your article is fake and all your sources are GOP and the videos you cite are doctored.
On a level above that, it is fascinating to me to watch this preference cascade play out. I think it's probably bad that we can have preference cascades on this level. But that doesn't make this one any less fascinating, and I thank you for writing your take before it is fully played out (unlike all the cowards).