Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, And His Disasterous Choice To Run Again.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
New York: Penguin Press, 314 p., $32.

The election-insider story never gets old because America’s elite political class, like everyone else, loves a good reality show, particularly if it’s starring them and their family members and loved ones in longform narrative text. In this downer Election 2024 tale, which would have made a better magazine article and will one day make a better major block in a chapter on a future Vol. 2, 800-page Biden autobiography, Tapper and Thompson use reporting and transcripts to document a decline everyone saw and understood in real time, including the whys–why he refused to recognize it at first, why he is now saying he could have won, etc. Normally, a book like this would be dominated by fast-paced acts designed to win an election; here the repeated scenes of lying, denial, protection and delusion–“a theology that bordered on zealotry” is how the authors put it–just add up to a sad tale of a 20th-century Delaware power couple, the Fates’ tough-as-nails playthings, who survived very dark times to get the crowns and scepters too late. Leading the world when you have to be personally led around is an amazing spectacle but power demands complete, mobster-like loyalty. So Special Counsel Robert Hur, the book’s coal-mine canary and his supervisor U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland get eventually vindicated but not publicly apologized to for, respectively, telling the truth and exhibiting ethics over partisanship because, well, politics ain’t beanbag. The idea that Biden’s roundtable would “Weekend-at-Bernie’s” a president is disturbing but most of the Monday-morning, anonymous quarterbacking by the politicos reads shallow because it is that; they signed on to the (lucrative) Washington political establishment with their blood a long time ago. With the Republican and Democratic parties about to experience a youth spurt in 2028, perhaps this almost-necessary book is just part of the last chapter of the Boomer and pre-Boomer political dynasties. For political diehards only.