RICH LOWRY: Maybe Biden isn’t such a wise statesman after all

Joe Biden is being transformed before our eyes, at least in how he’s portrayed in progressive circles and the media. The empathizer-in-chief and savior of democracy has become, in a matter of about two weeks, a clueless and selfish threat to all that they hold dear.

Poor Biden can be forgiven for not quite knowing what hit him. Just a couple of weekends ago, he and his family were at Camp David for a photo shoot with the famed Vogue photographer Annie Leibovitz — getting the favorable glossy coverage a powerful Democrat expects — and now everyone has concluded he’s a dangerous jackass.

“Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove,” Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic writes of Biden’s insistence, so far, on staying in the presidential race. Maureen Dowd has written of Scranton Joe: “His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.”

There is an element of threat to some of the commentary — get out of the race, or you will never lunch or shuffle around in this town again.

But it was only a few weeks ago that the party line was that Joe Biden was getting better with age, wiser and more self-restrained — before he suddenly and unexpectedly became a monster. Of course, nothing has changed about Biden in recent months, except his polling. The fact is that Democrats were always putting their faith in a hackish, replacement-level Democratic pol with a family influence-peddling business on the side.

Biden happened to be the right candidate at the right time to win the 2020 Democratic primary by default and then, win the 2020 general election by default. This achieved the crucial Democratic goal of ousting Donald Trump from the White House, but it didn’t invest Biden with any new magical qualities. He’s always been a C-level orator, with no particularly interesting ideas or especially notable talents, despite his high estimation of himself.

Back when he was at his most youthful and vigorous, he flamed out in his first presidential race by bizarrely adopting a British politician’s biography as his own. In Washington, his reputation as a blowhard with little or no self-awareness was well earned. Certainly, no one ever put much stock in Biden’s good judgment and discernment.

His greatest personal and political quality is resilience — given the tragedies in his life and the setbacks in his career — and staying power. Without them, he wouldn’t have taken office at age 78. But Biden’s abiding belief that he can bounce back from anything is playing into his irrationality about his current reduced state.

Democrats should have known what they had in Biden, and they should have known — and many did know — that he was in no condition to remain president for another 4½ years.

Yet they gave in to a delusion, one that was more evident with every jumbled utterance and every video of other VIPs leading him around. It’s one thing to be deluded by some compelling political figure, movement or ideal; it’s another to be deluded by a mediocre political lifer in visible decline.

And now they are all shocked that Joe Biden is putting his personal ambition, family interests and sense of ego above, as they see it, his party and his country.

They shouldn’t be — in potentially screwing it up in such epic fashion, Biden is just being Biden.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.