A Portrait of Delusion

Unfortunately for President Biden, George Stephanopoulos conducted an excellent interview last night. He was respectful, even compassionate, but unyielding. The result was not what the Biden campaign had hoped for.

It’s true that the President performed better than he did in the debate that unraveled his campaign, but not by much. What he gained in fluidity of speech, he lost by revealing a fugue-like detachment from political reality. The man simply does not understand what has happened to his career—either because he has been carefully shielded from this knowledge by his staff, or because he lacks the psychological capacity to absorb it. In either case, what we saw last night was the ghost of a candidate, haunting the familiar spaces of our politics without knowing that he no longer campaigns among the living.

While the President had more energy last night, his deficits of speech and reasoning were still evident. Consider his response to Stephanopoulos’s fourth question: