A number of news outlets reported Sunday and Monday that former President Barack Obama now fears President Joe Biden can't win the 2024 general election.
The Toronto Sun, Fox News and the New York Post all cited a Saturday Wall Street Journal article that quoted an anonymous source close to the former president as worried about recent polls showing former President Donald Trump with a sizeable lead over Biden.
Obama "knows this is going to be a close race" and "feels that Democrats very well could lose," the source reportedly told the Journal.
Biden losing would be "pretty dangerous for democracy," Obama reportedly fretted at the prospect of Trump coming back into office despite two previous impeachments and four criminal indictments.
Going to the original source on Tuesday, however, it appears that the references to Obama have been scrubbed from the article. Only David Axelrod, a former Obama advisor, and various other pundits weigh in as part of the article's current iteration.
Presumably, Obama did not want his fears on the record, even through anonymous reports, and pressured the Journal to amend its report to keep him out of it.
But it's not farfetched to think that Obama would be worried at this point: Biden has dropped even further in the polls and is close to Jimmy Carter circa 1979 territory. We all know how that turned out.
As Fox News's Bill Hemmer pointed out, it is "entirely too early right now" to know what will happen in 10-plus months.
"These numbers are going to change," he predicted.
If prior elections are a guide, Hemmer is right. A lot can and will happen before voters go to the polls. Democrats will be pulling out all the stops to humiliate Trump and scare Americans back into voting their way. And human nature being what it is, some of it will work, unfortunately.
But the flip side of Hemmer's argument--the one that could be circulating around Obama's mind--is that Biden will not get any younger, and the mental decline that has become so apparent will not miraculously go away.
In fact, if the last three years is any indication, Biden's decline will get noticeably worse in the next 10 months.
Coupled with bad feelings about the economy and a growing sense that having an open border is not sustainable, Biden's age and frailty form a one-two punch that Obama is apparently not sure he can recover from, even if he doesn't want to admit that publicly yet.
Some have speculated that Obama is really the one running the Biden administration in the background, and these fears could end up pulling the plug on Biden's campaign before too much longer if things don't turn around.
