America's choice: the forgetful old man or the demagogue?

There was good news and bad news for Joe Biden in last week's report on his handling of classified documents, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. 

The good news is that it found that his careless storage of government documents didn't warrant criminal charges. The bad news is that special counsel Robert Hur delivered "a devastating portrayal of Biden's mental acuity". There was no chance of a conviction, Hur said, because any jury would view Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory". 

In interviews, the 81-year-old had allegedly struggled to recall when his term as vice-president began and ended. Nor could he remember, "even within several years", when his son Beau died. Biden hit back at the report, insisting that his memory was fine; and his allies accused Hur, a Trump appointee, of bad faith.

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Plenty of evidence

Biden's problem is that there is plenty of supporting evidence for Hur's point, said Peter Bergen on CNN. At one event last week, Biden confused Emmanuel Macron with the former French leader François Mitterrand, who died in 1996. At another, he struggled to remember the name of the terrorist group Hamas. Even at the press conference in which he angrily defended his memory, he referred to Egypt's Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico. No wonder Biden's handlers keep his unscripted appearances to a minimum, said Noah Rothman in National Review. The "enfeebled" president "just isn't up to this aspect of the job, and Americans have noticed".

Trump is not immune to mix-ups

Clearly, Biden is bad at names and dates, said Andrew Prokop on Vox. It's embarrassing, but not in itself "disqualifying for the presidency". There's still no evidence that his governing ability has been impaired in any way. Besides, Trump is hardly immune to such mix-ups. In recent months, he has claimed at least seven times either that Barack Obama is president, or that he ran against Obama; mixed up his Republican rival Nikki Haley with the former Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi; and identified a picture of E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, as a picture of his ex-wife, Marla Maples. America isn't spoiled for choice when it comes to its presidential nominees-in-waiting, said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. On one side is a doddery 81-year-old with a poor memory; on the other is a demagogic 77-year-old facing four criminal cases. "How can this be our reality?"