Remember that hot mic moment during the “scandal-free” Obama-Biden years when our nation’s commander-in-chief was caught red-handed telling Russia’s puppet president, Dmitry Medvedev, to let Russia’s real president, Vladimir Putin, know that he’d have “more flexibility” to compromise our national interests after he’s been safely elected to a second term?

Well, according to The Washington Post, that sort of “flexibility” is no longer a presidential bug; it’s a feature — at least for Democrat candidates.

“Biden has long had a nose for his party’s shifting center,” writes the Post. “When the Democrats moved right — embracing tough-on-crime measures and opposing government funding for abortion — Biden was there. When the party recently veered left — dropping those positions and emphasizing racial justice and gender equity — Biden embraced those priorities. … In the meantime, he is giving all sides something to hold on to. Biden has suggested he would emulate big-spending Franklin D. Roosevelt, but aides have also said he’s deeply mindful of the federal deficit. He’s embraced the symbolism of the Black Lives Matter movement, but he rejects some of its highest-profile demands.”

To win the November election, then, Biden is trying to emulate the guy who gave him his big break. “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” wrote candidate Obama in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope.

The Post’s puff piece does suggest that Biden’s lack of ideological conviction could lead to some serious infighting if he becomes president — especially given his clear cognitive decline. As Paul Mirengoff notes, “One has to go back to Woodrow Wilson’s second term to find such a president. But Biden’s mental capacity seems somewhat diminished already, and will likely decline as he approaches his 80th birthday. Thus, there might well be something like a void in the Oval Office in the event of a Biden presidency.”

“Somewhat diminished”? Biden’s former White House stenographer, Mike McCormick, says we’re giving short shrift to the 77-year-old former VP’s reduced capacity. “It is a complete difference from what he was in 2017,” said McCormick. “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the same mental acuity as he did four years ago. … He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy.”

Given that the American people are now less than two months away from deciding whether Biden is mentally fit for taking on the world’s toughest and most important job, shouldn’t the mainstream media be delving into this? Shouldn’t reporters be demanding that Biden make himself available to them for unscripted questions and serious interviews? Or does obscenely obscene songstress Cardi B alone merit this journalistic privilege?

David Harsanyi, for one, takes exception to the media’s shamefully obvious kid-glove treatment of Biden, and he’s put together a list of questions he believes any journalist worth his salt should be asking. These include questions about Biden’s dropping of support for the Hyde Amendment, which forbids taxpayer funding of abortions — a position that the ostensibly Catholic candidate had held for decades. (As a follow-up, some enterprising journalist might also ask Biden if he still supports “the Biden amendment,” which bans foreign aid from being used for abortion-related research.)

And is Biden still committed to putting gun-grabbing Beto O'Rourke in charge of his administration’s gun control policy? Will he repeal the Republican tax cuts, given that he’s repeatedly denounced them? Will he reinstate the Obama administration’s Title IX rules that deny due process to college students, or do the rest of us deserve the same rights he has concerning Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against him? How does he explain his opportunistic flip-flop on defunding the police? Or his flip-flop on fracking? Or his flip-flop on the 1994 crime bill he authored?

C'mon, Joe. What are you afraid of?