Thursday, October 1, 2026
Somehow, all of the recent negative publicity about former President Joe Biden has brought to mind another Joe.
Back in the 1920s, one of the best-known baseball players in the business was Shoeless Joe Jackson. Jackson was an outfielder who had the fourth-highest batting average in baseball history.
]He got entangled in the infamous Black Sox Scandal in 1919, in which players on the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series.
Jackson eventually traveled around the country on a rehabilitation tour, but wherever he went, someone in the crowd would yell out, “Say it isn’t so, Joe!”
Having been a friend and a longtime admirer of Joe Biden, the more I read about his final years in office, the more I want to say to him, “Say it isn’t so, Joe.”
Biden took office in 2020 on the crest of a wave of voters who didn’t want to give President Trump a second term. They admired Biden’s 40-plus years as a successful and admired public official. At the outset of his presidency, Biden was a strong and feisty leader, promising dozens of reforms that sounded very much like those of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His predecessor had proposed that America rebuild its infrastructure, but somehow that promise never became a reality. But Biden kept it.
He kept many of his other promises, too, but the record now shows that he forgot one big one. At his inauguration, he pledged to be a “bridge to the future,” but as his days in office wound down, he wasn’t much of a bridge to anywhere. As a former elected official, I understand some of the hoopla that follows you when you hold any office. But a president gets to hear “Hail to the Chief” every time he enters a room and gets to use Air Force One, a gigantic flying White House. Being an American president is a very big deal.
These days, it seems that everyone in the national media is busy making a fast buck by reciting Biden’s psychological lapses and the lies of his staff members. Just like the president and his family got caught up in the experience of being the big boss, so did the staff, all of whom wanted to stay close to the center of world power. If there is anyone to blame for the Biden fiasco, there are countless people who qualify for that selfish dishonesty.
If you listen to all the talking heads on television, you’d be forgiven for believing that Biden was the first president who wasn’t playing with a full deck. Few ever mention President Woodrow Wilson, who had a stroke while in office and turned over the running of the country to his wife. I loved Ronald Reagan, but it was no secret that his wife, Nancy, wouldn’t let him take any serious official action unless his horoscope permitted it. Most of his physical failings occurred after he left office, but watching his final days was at times a painful experience.
In recent days, anyone with a political opinion has been bashing the Democratic Party and predicting its doom. It may be the case that many of the party’s current leaders failed us, but the real Democratic Party is alive and well, and its leaders are looking forward to the midterm elections next year.
I still remember listening to my close Republican friends after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. They went into a state of mourning, but after a relatively short period of time they elected two members of the Bush family to sit in the Oval Office.
I enjoy watching politics for so many different reasons. One of them is that the average voter has a very short memory and holds a grudge for a very short time. The coming of every new year is a time when voters are capable of making a 360-degree turn, and if you’re the incumbent party, you’d better be prepared for not only the unexpected, but the unimaginable. So I wish Joe Biden the best possible recovery, and urge all the partisans to hold off on their predictions for at least the next six months.
Jerry Kremer was a state assemblyman for 23 years, and chaired the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee for 12 years. Comments about this column? jkremer@liherald.com.
