Joe Biden won the normality test in 2020.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about him. He just seemed like a steady hand who had been around for a while, who didn’t look or sound like a radical, and who knew how Washington worked.

He wasn’t the leader of a movement, wasn’t charismatic and wasn’t particularly witty or well-spoken. He was, in fact, completely uninteresting and utterly conventional. He was just the most normal guy in the room.

He benefited from a favorable contrast with the magnetic, endlessly interesting, constantly outrageous, norm-busting President Trump, whose theatrical and chaotic governance made him vulnerable to a basement campaign run by a candidate happy, in ice-cream terms, to be vanilla to Trump’s rocky road.

If Democrats hope to rerun the 2020 campaign, they will once again have plenty of material to work with against Trump, who provides more of it on a regular basis. It’s the other side of the equation that’s the problem — the supposed safe alternative is AWOL and never coming back.

That erstwhile Joe Biden, the generic, broadly acceptable president, didn’t survive contact with the reality of his presidency.

Of course, he destroyed his reputation as the steady hand with his disastrous mishandling of Afghanistan. It’s not just that he kneecapped our allies and abandoned Americans — all accompanied by Fall of Saigon–like images of chaos and desperation on the ground — but that he insisted everything was fine.

After this, it was impossible to look at Biden the same, and indeed his approval rating has never recovered.

Maybe you could say that he was dealt a bad hand in Afghanistan, or, after 20 years, the intervention had to end one way or the other.

The border, however, is even more damning. Biden took a situation that was under control, blew it up, refused to readjust when the consequences became obvious, insisted that the crisis wasn’t a crisis as it began to be felt all over the country, and engaged in implausible blame-shifting — all because he was beholden to a new, radical ideology hostile to borders as such.

This wasn’t moderate or competent. And it certainly wasn’t normal.

Even if Biden’s record were unassailable, the way he walks and speaks now would make it impossible for him to be a nothing-to-see-here conventional politician again.

We have never in the modern media age witnessed a president this infirm. It is not what anyone expects from the president of the United States, a role associated with vigor, energy and very often youth.

Watching Biden mumble through speeches, get confused about his stage directions, mix up names and old memories, and walk so stiffly and awkwardly that he seems at risk of stumbling or falling at any time is deeply unsettling.

A president is supposed to reassure the public with his bearing and words; Biden now largely does the opposite.

For most people, he doesn’t even meet the most basic standard of seeming capable of performing his duties for the entirety of his term in office if he’s reelected. Indeed, that Biden will serve as president until January 2029 may be among the most preposterous things a major political party has ever asked the American public to believe.

Democrats will take comfort from the president’s fiery State of the Union performance, but Biden shouting his way through an extensively rehearsed speech on a teleprompter didn’t make him seem any younger and won’t allay the well-founded concerns about his age.

In the latest New York Times poll, 71% of people agree strongly or somewhat that Biden is “just too old to be president.” This is unprecedented territory, and is politically perilous when you hope to be the default candidate arrayed against an unacceptable alternative.

Donald Trump, who in so many ways is an outlier in American politics, is now matched up against another outlier. The normality advantage that Biden enjoyed in 2020 is gone, and defeating his Republican adversary has, accordingly, gotten that much more difficult.

© 2024 by King Features Syndicate