Democrats have long needed an honest reckoning with Joe Biden’s failed presidency, which ended with his humiliating decision to abandon his reelection bid at nearly the last possible moment in July 2024—which in turn led to a hobbled campaign by Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. A disaster on that scale calls for at least some self-reflection. When dealing with a collective entity such as a political party, the minimum demand should be a thoroughgoing autopsy.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats have largely avoided even cursory introspection. The sheer awfulness of Donald Trump is one factor for the lack of internal critique,—or more accurately, a convenient easy excuse. The forthcoming publication on May 20 of the book Original Sin by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is igniting the debate that many Democratic insiders have been trying to tamp down. The book documents Joe Biden’s deteriorating cognitive capacity and health during his presidency and alleges a cover-up by Biden’s inner circle.

Speaking on Tuesday to reporters about whether Biden should even have sought reelection given public perception about his aging, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg said, “We’re also not in a position to wallow in hindsight. We’ve got to get ready for some fundamental tests for the future of the country and this party.”

Given the necessity of fighting Trump, there’s a temptation to say that the party doesn’t have time for potentially divisive internal wrangling. But there is a more self-interested reason for wanting not to “wallow in hindsight.” As Tapper and Thompson document, all too many high officials and political strategists, many of whom are still guiding the party, were implicated in Biden’s scandalous coverup. Writing in The Nation, Norman Solomon rightly decried the pervasive “careerism” that implicated all wings of the party, centrists and progressives alike.

The problem with Buttigieg’s refusal to “wallow in hindsight” is that for many voters the failure of the Biden presidency isn’t something that can easily be relegated to the past but remains a reason to distrust the Democratic Party. In particular, the allegation of a cover-up casts a long shadow. A poll conducted by NBC in March showed Democrats were at a historical low point in public esteem, with only 27 percent of Americans having a favorable opinion of the party. In contrast to Buttigieg’s head-in-the-sand attitude, Representative Ro Khanna was more realistic when he posted on Wednesday, “To rebuild trust, Democrats must be honest. In light of the facts that have come out, Joe Biden should not have run for re-election, and we should have had an open primary.”

In an excerpt of their book in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson paint a dire picture of Biden’s incapacity as president:

The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.

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But the Biden scandal goes beyond his catastrophic decision to run again in 2024. Reviewing Original Sin in The Washington Post, Alex Shepherd of The New Republic notes:

there is evidence that Biden’s cognitive decline began all the way back in 2015, after the death of his son Beau, and that he required extensive help to conduct straightforward interviews during the 2020 election (he was often helped by being able to use a teleprompter, since so much of campaigning was done remotely during the Covid pandemic). The most troubling suggestion in Tapper and Thompson’s book is that Biden’s real original sin wasn’t running for re-election—it was running for the presidency in the first place.

If Biden’s decision to run in 2020 was a mistake, the scandal of his presidency encompasses a much wider group of leaders. After all, Biden was faltering in the early primaries when, in a bid to stop Bernie Sanders’s surging campaign, establishment leaders coalesced around Biden as the candidate with the best chance to prevent the left from gaining the nomination. This led to Representative James Clyburn’s pivotal endorsement of Biden before the South Carolina primary, as well as the decision by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out of the race in favor of Biden. Behind the scenes, former president Barack Obama reportedly herded party support in Biden’s direction.

Biden was always a lackluster campaigner. It took the party elite to win him the nomination. His victory in the subsequent general election was also aided by outside factors, notably the Covid disaster (which allowed Biden to do the kind of remote campaigning he preferred) and Trump’s historic unpopularity. If Biden won the 2020 nomination because of the party elite, then his failures belong not just to him alone—or to his inner circle.

After his 2020 victory, Biden’s cognitive decline intersected with his more unpleasant personal traits. The fact that he required the assistance of the party elite to win the nomination did not make Biden a more humble man. Quite the reverse. Biden seems to have seen his victory as a personal vindication against the doubters he thought always underestimated him.

A stubborn and arrogant unwillingness to listen to critics characterized Biden’s presidency. On foreign policy, he refused to budge from his bear-hug strategy of embracing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden’s mental blinkers were so strong he was incapable of even seeing conflicting evidence. NBC News reported a telling detail in an account of a private meeting Biden had in April 2024 with Arab and Muslim Americans: “A doctor who attended was taken aback when she showed Biden prints of photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza—to which Biden responded that he had seen those images before. The problem, the doctor said, was that she had printed the photos from her own iPhone.”

Writing in The American Prospect, veteran political strategist Stan Greenberg offered a compelling account of how Biden’s arrogance sabotaged Kamala Harris’s campaign. Greenberg notes that prior to dropping out Biden didn’t want to acknowledge persistent economic problems but preferred to tout his achievements. According to Greenberg, “Biden’s deep personal insecurity and paranoia produced a preposterous campaign based on his accomplishments, in what was really a change election.”

After dropping out, Biden continued to interject himself into the campaign in harmful ways, aided by the fact that his former campaign staff was now running the Harris campaign. As Greenberg recounts:

Biden did grudgingly drop out—but not until July 21st. The short remaining time led Harris to keep Biden’s campaign largely intact. Before her debate with Trump, he called her and insisted there be “No daylight, kid.”

Biden felt Harris had underutilized him and did everything possible to be part of the story at the close. That led him to join a campaign call during Harris’s closing speech on the Ellipse to observe that “the only garbage I see floating there is his supporters.” Using actual garbage trucks, Trump was able to fuse Biden and Harris and tie them to Hillary Clinton calling Trump voters “deplorables.”…

The campaign wrote an economic speech saying, “As president of the United States, it will be my intention to build on the foundation of this progress,” making it easier to brand Harris with “Bidenomics.”

As I saw, the Biden staff didn’t mind her sliding away from the “cost of living.” Biden would not utter the words because he thought it was criticism of the economy.

Greenberg’s focus on Biden’s arrogant economic message is an important supplement to the Tapper and Thompson account of Biden’s cognitive decline. Biden’s visible aging was a big political problem—and likely the primary driver of his unpopularity. But it wasn’t the only problem. Out of personal arrogance, perhaps made worse by his cognitive decline, Biden was unable to listen to critics of his domestic and foreign policy. And by insisting that there be “no daylight” between himself and Harris, Biden wrapped an anchor around the neck of his vice president.

While Biden had some genuine domestic achievements, particularly in his first two years, his larger presidency left a blighted record. Democrats won’t be able to win back the public unless they start talking frankly about what when wrong—and how party elites were implicated in the disaster. And until those elites are replaced.