No. of Recommendations: 11
I’m still agog that they were able to hide his decline for so long,
Did they though? Seem like a bit like revisionist hang-wringing to me : )
It makes a better story for blame allocation to say that it was a cover up, but you can't cover up something already that widely known.
It was hardly a secret that he was somewhere near the doddering end of the spectrum well before he was elected, so the only question was ever the precise degree. It's hard to say where exactly someone sits on that spectrum even with a serious test. Remember "I'm running as a proud democrat for the Senate" during the 2020 presidential race?*
Seen from afar, I would give his verbal skills an extremely low score (though did I hear he always had a habit of mixing up words?) but in the end the term was actually pretty effective. No matter one's political persuasion, they definitely got some major legislation passed through a system that is no longer built for that. I suppose one could say that it's a team sport, and the team made their goals even if the captain was not really competent.
Jim
* Though if you listen to the whole clip, the garble was more the elision of a verb or using the wrong tense, not the "senate" part. He was apparently trying to make the point that he had been a proud democrat when he ran for the senate, he had been a proud democrat when he ran for vice president, and he was then a proud democrat running for president.
My transcription, bearing in mind that nobody makes that much grammatical sense when you transcribe too literally:
"We have to come together, that's why I'm running. I'm running as a proud democrat. For the Senate. When I had run as a proud democrat for vice president. I'm running as a proud democrat for president".
For it to make sense, the intended meaning would probably have been like one of these:
"We have to come together, that's why I'm running. I'm running as a proud democrat. [I ran as a proud democrat] For the Senate. When I had run as a proud democrat for vice president. I'm running as a proud democrat for president".
--or just change the tense--
"We have to come together, that's why I'm running. I [ran] as a proud democrat. For the Senate. When I had run as a proud democrat for vice president. I'm running as a proud democrat for president".
