The Careerism That Enabled Biden’s Reelection Run Still Poisons the Democratic Party

Original Sin is out after several months of drumroll, setting out to be the definitive book about—in the words of its subtitle—President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The publisher has trumpeted a media report that it is “the book Biden allies fear the most,” promising revelations while keeping the contents so tightly under wraps that a nondisclosure agreement was required to get an advance copy. (The New York Times broke the embargo today.)

Written by CNN lead anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, the book recounts some notable moments, but what it mainly offers is a slow burn. The facts and anecdotes have cumulative impact, showing how intently the Biden family, top White House aides, and reelection strategists worked hard to conceal the president’s worsening cognitive state. They dutifully lied to journalists and strove to gaslight the public. While Original Sin doesn’t provide some single sensational reveal, it sheds light on official deception.

Biden relied on senior adviser Mike Donilon and counselor Steve Ricchetti, a former corporate lobbyist who chaired Biden’s 2020 campaign. Their systematic denial of the president’s impairment was pivotal in wrecking prospects that a viable 2024 Democratic presidential nominee would have enough time to gather momentum against Donald Trump.

The fear-driven conformity of party loyalists festered in both the White House and Congress, while Biden’s approval rating remained stuck at around 40 percent during the two and a half years that began in January 2022. “No Democrats in the White House or leaders on Capitol Hill raised any doubts, either privately with the president or publicly, about Biden’s second run,” Original Sin reports, adding: “Democrats knew that the White House watched closely for any signs of dissent. They kept quiet and went along.”

The silence continued with almost no exceptions while Biden became more frail and disoriented. At the White House Christmas party for members of Congress in December 2023, the authors write, longtime Washington Representative Adam Smith “was stunned by what he encountered. Interacting with guests and standing in the photo line, Biden seemed completely out of it.” Four months later, when cohosts of the Pod Save America podcast visited Biden at the White House, “He was incoherent. His stories were meandering and confusing.”

But the Democratic leadership was bent on a deceptive course. Unmentioned in the book is what the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, said from a podium on Capitol Hill in mid-February 2024: “I talk to President Biden regularly, sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it’s fine, it’s as good as it’s been over the years.… He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”

(Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press in early 2025, Schumer was shown a video clip of that 11-month-old statement before being asked, “What do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden’s mental acuity?” Schumer replied, “Look, we didn’t,” and then instantly changed the subject.)

Biden became so detached from political reality that eight days after the calamitous June 27 debate performance, he claimed in a prime-time ABC News interview: “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up.” Another week later, according to Tapper and Thompson, during a visit to Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Schumer asked Biden whether he’d spoken with his pollsters—and the answer was “No.” The book says the conversation then went like this:

SCHUMER: “Mr. President, your chances of winning are only 5 percent. I’ve talked to your pollsters; I know all three of them.… And they think it’s a 5 percent chance. Five percent.”

BIDEN: “Really?”

SCHUMER: “They’re [Donilon and Ricchetti] not telling you. The pollsters told me, ‘He’s not seen our polls. It all goes to Donilon, and Donilon interprets it.’ Okay? You have a 5 percent chance. The analytics guy who probably knows this best said it’s 1 percent.”

Readers should take with grains of salt the wording of fly-on-the-wall quotes that appear without so much as attribution like “according to,” or a source “recalled hearing.” Nowhere in the book do the authors acknowledge that the dialogue appearing between quotation marks might have been spun or exaggerated by sources eager to make themselves look good or others look bad.

As for statements made directly to the authors, the book includes many anonymous quotes. A “prominent Democratic strategist who publicly defended Biden” said: “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.” The authors often paraphrase damning assertions from unnamed advisers and officials, including cabinet members who said Biden could not be relied on to perform as president during late-night emergencies.

Tapper and Thompson emphasize that they gathered most of the book’s information “after the election of 2024, when officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk”—but even then, few felt free enough to allow their names to be used. That says a lot about the persistence of a careerist culture that impelled so many Democratic leaders and party operators to help cover up Biden’s decline in the first place.

Partisan denial transcended ideology. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were outspoken in favor of Biden’s reelection effort until he withdrew from the race. Progressive legislators were no better than their centrist colleagues in resisting pressure from the Biden White House to pretend that the president was fit to run again, while the Democratic Party’s power structure insisted on a position opposed by a sizable majority of the party’s voters.

In early 2023, an Associated Press poll found that only 37 percent of Democrats said they wanted Biden to run for reelection. At the time, my RootsAction colleagues placed a full-page ad for our Don’t Run Joe campaign in The Hill, appealing for a primary challenger to Biden under the headline HELP WANTED. “Historic position available for articulate and principled Democrat willing to show political courage on behalf of party and country,” the ad said, while “qualifications include a record of progressive advocacy.” There were no takers.

Perhaps the most noteworthy sentence in Original Sin is this one about Kamala Harris: “The issue that she truly and most strongly disagreed with the president on behind closed doors was Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.” Her public echoing of Biden’s explanations for huge nonstop weapons shipments to Israel was both morally unconscionable and politically damaging. By a big margin, polls were clear that most Americans wanted to stop arming Israel.

President Biden set the template for unquestioning support of Israel. The willingness, even eagerness, of Democratic politicians and operatives to loyally deny obvious truths while pandering to Biden meant helping to continue the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Now—with bombs still killing civilians while Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid is using starvation as a war weapon—few in Congress offer anywhere near the kind of clarity that Sanders provided in a powerful speech May 8 on the Senate floor. “History will never forget that we allowed this to happen,” he said, “and, for us here in the United States, that we in fact enabled this ongoing atrocity.”

Overall, Biden has given the Democratic Party an imprint of moral corrosion and weak messaging. A result is that what routinely passes for opposition to fascistic Trump comes across as little more than forgettable rhetoric and rote activities. Holding town halls around the country, raising money to file lawsuits against the Trump administration’s lawless actions, and appealing for funds to defeat the GOP in the next elections are all well and good—but no substitute for daily outreach and methodical organizing in communities nationwide. As the party’s current dismal approval ratings reflect, mainly self-touting as the Anti-Trump Party is measurably insufficient.

The operative mentality of Democratic Party leaders is not much different now than it was during the protracted cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline. Today, like a political ghost, Joe Biden haunts the party, with leadership that prefers hagiography to candor.

As this spring began, NBC News reported that Biden “has told some Democratic leaders he’ll raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground.” The response was striking from a Democratic National Committee vice chair, Jane Kleeb, who is the new president of the Association of State Democratic Committees. “If you were to call any state party chair and ask them if they wanted Joe Biden to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be yes,” she said. “He is beloved by the party and beloved by the voters.”

Similar disconnection from the base of the party is evident when its House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, publicly lauds Biden as a present-day political guide. In mid-April, when Biden delivered his first post-presidency speech, Jeffries told reporters: “This is an all hands on deck moment, which is why President Biden’s voice in this moment is so important.”

Some prominent Democrats expressed pleasure as Biden reemerged to do TV interviews this month with appearances on ABC and the BBC. Representative Jim Clyburn said he was “glad” about Biden’s new media presence (“Biden would be beyond crazy just to quietly let his record get misrepresented”), while longtime power broker Donna Brazile commented that “there’s a place for Joe Biden at the table” and “former presidents have every right to speak up.” The new DNC chair, Ken Martin, went beyond the call of tactful duty by saying that he is “deeply grateful for the president’s service not only to our nation but his ongoing service to the party.” Grateful for Biden’s ongoing service to the party?

When a CNN poll in March asked Democratic voters “which one person best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party,” only 1 percent chose Biden.

Four months after Trump’s inauguration, the party’s highest echelon of leaders seems to be on automatic pilot in traditional modes. Meanwhile, the pace of the Democratic National Committee lags far behind the Trumpist rampage against democracy. A petition cosponsored by Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction is urging the Democratic National Committee to convene an emergency meeting, and Representative Ro Khanna has endorsed that appeal. But the 448-member DNC remains on its regular twice-a-year schedule, with the next meeting set for August.

In the meantime, the plan for the DNC’s executive committee to hold a single three-hour session at the end of this month in Little Rock, Arkansas, hardly conveys a sense of national urgency. That committee last met five months ago.

The gap between the Democratic grassroots and the people running the national party is immense. The disconnect is dragging down public confidence in Democratic congressional leaders, which Gallup last month gauged at 25 percent—a nine-point plunge since the previous low in 2023 and the lowest ever recorded since the polling firm began such a measurement a quarter century ago.

The conventional behavior by party leaders is disheartening to registered Democrats, independents, and others eager to build power against MAGA forces. In effect, the same party hierarchy that a year ago was offering profuse assurances about Biden’s viability as a candidate for reelection is now telling us that the party is in the process of mounting an effective challenge to the Trump autocracy.

When the DNC sent out a May 10 e-mail signed by Kamala Harris with the subject line “I am asking you to stay involved,” the only requested involvement was to send money to the DNC. Harris’s message said that “the work we started with my campaign is carried on by the DNC”—which, she asserted, is working to “implement lessons learned.” But there’s scant evidence that those at the top of the Democratic Party have learned crucial lessons.

“One of the great lessons from 2024,” Democratic strategist David Plouffe told the authors of Original Sin, is that “never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true.” Now, people are seeing that basic structures of US democracy are undergoing demolition—but the Democratic Party has yet to act as though what people are seeing is really true.