An event that had already become inevitable on one evening in June, almost a month ago, finally happened on Sunday morning, July 21. It had been 24 days since millions of Americans had watched, dumbstruck, the president’s disastrous debate performance, after questions had long swirled about the state of his cognitive abilities. Since that catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, the clock started to tick down for Joe Biden, with the growing realization that it would be impossible to erase from voters’ memories the image of an old man overwhelmed by a truculent opponent, eager to take back power once again after he had tried to hold onto it by force.

That image was the exact opposite of the strength and leadership that one absolutely must project in a modern political campaign. The first instinct of the president and his supporters was to rally around his presidential record – the same list of accomplishments he was inevitably keen to stress at the end, in his letter announcing his withdrawal from the race.

The administration of the man chosen in 2020 to pacify and return the nation to normalcy after the earthquakes of the Trump era – the pandemic and an attempted coup – has indeed achieved a lot, objectively even more than Obama, on welfare and employment, as well as the economy, with the exception of the sore point of inflation (although this has also dropped to 3 percent). However, it was always going to be completely futile to try to fight this new battle on past achievements, when it was centered around doubts about the future.

The worries were about whether he still had the ability to engage in the campaign, not to mention handle four more years as president. And,........

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