America
Whose Cancer Is It?
Joe Biden’s terminal illness is a parable on a sick republic’s political disease
By Amotz Asa-El
JOE Biden – the saga, the tragedy and the epic – has just entered its last act.
The man whose presidency began too late and ended too early, has just proceeded from the cognitive decline that marred his incumbency to the aggressive cancer that is its epilogue
Even Shakespeare couldn’t have scripted a more proverbial finale to a life that has been a tragedy in three acts: First, the blows to its hero’s family, then the presidency that wasn’t, and finally the presidency that was.
Biden had built a happy family only to see it shattered by fate, twice. First, when his wife Neilia and their baby Naomi were killed in a car accident. Then, when the couple’s elder son Beau – who with his brother Hunter was in the car as their mother and sister rode to their deaths – died of brain cancer at age 46.
As would befit a tragic hero, Biden prevailed. After initially contemplating suicide – as he later imparted in a TV interview – the young widower recovered, and pursued an impressive, 36-year senatorial career.
And after Beau’s death, which caught Biden in his vice presidency’s seventh year, the bereaved father couldn’t collect the strength to run for president. That is how the field was left for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Still, half-a-decade later Biden had recovered from that loss too, and became the president of the United States.
As seen the day he defeated Trump, Biden’s victory was not only his, but the triumph of everything the American dream embodied: resilience, confidence, poetic justice and success.
That was then. Now, faced with the Biden presidency’s collapse and aftermath, his illness emerges as a parable on a sick republic’s political disease.
THE PERSONAL losses Biden endured were a fitting backdrop to his political career’s own tragedies, the second of which was his presidency.
Having begun when he was 78, older than any other newly elected American president, it was marred by his age. The final blow came during the televised presidential debate, after which even Biden’s most loyal enthusiasts, like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, demanded his departure, which indeed arrived within days.
Losing power, particularly voluntarily, is not a tragedy, but this departure was tragic, not only because it wasn’t really voluntary, but because Biden’s was a very reasonable presidency that may well have been remarkable had it happened earlier in his life.
That might have happened. Back in 2008, when the Democratic Party held its presidential primaries, Biden was a candidate, but the party preferred Barack Obama, who then chose Biden as his running mate. It should have been the other way around.
Biden back then brought all the experience and wisdom from which his presidency would benefit, but none of the age that would debilitate it. He was ripe. Obama was exactly the opposite. Inexperienced, young, brash, frivolous, overconfident and smug. He was unripe.
Historians will wonder whether this failed choice caused the rise of Donald Trump, just like they will wonder whether Obama would have defeated John McCain if not for the financial meltdown in Wall Street.
Scholars will also wonder what might have happened had Biden run against Trump in 2016, and not Hillary Clinton. Be the answer to these intriguing questions what it may, millions now think that the Democrats and Republicans have each repeatedly offered America the wrong presidential candidates.
It follows, that the emergence of an American president who stormed America’s political pillars – the constitution, the judiciary, the media, and the ideal of global liberty – was not an accident. It was part of a systemic decay.
THE BIPARTISAN failures to field proper candidates were but one side of the same coin, whose flipside is the two parties’ loss of the will to fight for their own convictions. This is the void into which rightwing populists and leftwing progressives have barged, with equal momentum, impunity and zeal.
That is why Joe Biden emerges now, even more than he did before, as the last Mohican of a departed political era; an era in which American leaders, regardless of political stripe, sided with democracies, opposed tyrannies, harmonized with the press, led by consultation, governed through planning, and saluted the courts.
Now the Republican Party arty says nothing to the leader who smooches with the dictators of Russia, Turkey and North Korea, and the Democratic Party accommodates a whole wing that fans Islamist fanaticism’s war on the Jewish state.
Clearly, both parties have lost their moral compasses, and the reason is as glaring as it is menacing: America’s political parties have ceased to be parties.
As noted here during the Trump-Clinton contest (“The decadence of American politics,” 20 August 2015), American politics’ problem is that its parties are too weak. They no longer decide anything, much less show a path. Instead, they offer political wrestlers an arena, regardless of who they are or what they represent.
Think of the Israeli antithesis. The closest Israel ever came to crowning an inexperienced leader was when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister at 46, without having ever served as a cabinet minister. However, by then he had been ambassador to the UN, head of the opposition, and a deputy minister in prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s office, where he saw close up how the country is run.
America’s parties, by contrast, fielded as presidential candidates the woefully inexperienced Trump and Obama. Had American parties functioned, they would have disqualified such candidacies.
The Republican Party would have told Donald Trump to run on behalf of another party, and the Democratic Party would have told Barack Obama to delay his presidential bid by a decade or two. We have riper candidates, they would have explained, people with much more experience, humility and wisdom than you currently display; people like Joe Biden.
Jerusalem Post 23 May 2025