Jill Biden dooms Dems

She is Joe Biden's number one caretaker, adviser and enabler — much the same way Nancy Reagan took care of her husband's final few years as he began to battle Alzheimer's.

Jill Biden is the one Democrats have to deal with — if she says to stay in the race, he'll stay in. And right now Jill is winning. She clearly likes being first lady and won't give it up easily.

Dr. Jill took the extraordinary step of putting out a statement attacking the special counsel's report recommending the president face no charges for holding classified documents because he was too old and not mentally sharp enough to be convicted.

"Joe is 81, that's true, but he's 81 doing more in an hour than most people do in a day," Jill Biden said in a fundraising appeal to nervous Democrats.

Jill blasted the special counsel's report as "inaccurate and personal political attacks" and seized on the counsel's claim that the president couldn't remember when his son Beau died.

"Believe me, like anyone who has lost a child, Beau and his death never leave him," Jill said. "I hope you can imagine how it felt to read that attack — not just as Joe's wife, but Beau's mother."

Yet Democrats may worry that Jill Biden is clearly overstepping her bounds by leading her husband's defense at a time when the president should be facing reality and bowing out.

More and more Democrats are abandoning ship and coming to the conclusion that Biden cannot beat Donald Trump

In a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday a stunning 86% of Americans say Biden is too old to serve a second term.

Famed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, one of the best writers of her generation, put it aptly in a recent column where she argues the Biden team has to stop pretending his age and frailty aren't an issue.

"Jill Biden and his other advisers come up with ways to obscure signs of senescence — from shorter news conferences to almost zero print interviews to TV interviews mainly with fawning MSNBC anchors," Dowd wrote. "But many Americans are quite concerned about the 81-year-old president's crepuscular mien. It's the elephant in the room — except that elephants never forget."

And in an op-ed piece for the liberal New York Times, a prominent columnist speculated that Biden should drop out of the race shortly before the convention so Democrats can nominate someone else.

"Joe Biden should not be running for re-election," opinion columnist Ross Douthat wrote. "That much was obvious well before the special prosecutor's comments on the president's memory lapses inspired a burst of age-related angst. What is less obvious is how Biden should get out of it."

Douthat wrote that Biden should hang in until August "when he would shock the world by announcing his withdrawal from the race, decline to issue any endorsement, and invite the convention delegates to choose his replacement."

That scenario depends on Jill Biden going along with it, and right now she's a definite no.

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Joe Battenfeld
Boston Herald/(TNS)

Joe Battenfeld is a veteran Boston Herald political columnist and multimedia reporter.