Top Democratic strategist David Axelrod said “conversations” about Biden’s health and mental acuity as president “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was more pointed in his response to whether Biden’s cancer diagnosis raised new questions about his ability to serve or transparency regarding the former president’s medical condition.

“It seems to me entirely inappropriate that at this moment in time when President Biden is dealing with a serious and aggressive form of cancer, there are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward at a time when they actually are taking health care away from the American people,” Jeffries told reporters. 

“Maybe let’s not play partisan games with a cancer diagnosis, okay?” posted Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and former Vice President Kamala Harris‘s adviser, in response to those wondering if Biden’s latest health scare was similar in nature to what has been reported in books such as Original Sin.

When Vice President JD Vance wished Biden well but questioned whether this was another example of the former president’s health receiving insufficient scrutiny, Politico’s Jonathan Martin described it as “a real-time depiction of somebody struggling between the responsibilities of high office and the temptations that come with being totally online.”    

President Donald Trump has also called Biden’s diagnosis “very sad” while expressing skepticism about the timeline. 

It is possible that Biden’s prostate cancer is wholly unrelated to the problems that led voters to increasingly question his ability to continue as president as his term wore on, with Democrats nudging him aside after he struggled in a presidential debate with Trump on June 27, 2024.

But knowing what we know now about the extent of Biden’s age-related decline and his team’s efforts to conceal it from the public, questions about this sudden diagnosis of an advanced cancer that apparently went undetected while in office seem valid.

The dismissal of all Biden age-related questions as partisan talking points or conservative disinformation was a big part of why the media got the story so wrong, and many Democrats were caught flatfooted by his debate performance. 

If Democratic elites had listened to their party’s rank-and-file voters, who told pollsters they wanted another option in 2024, they would not have been sent scrambling in the weeks following that debate. If journalists had not been so eager to accept the “cheap fakes” explanation for video footage of seemingly bad Biden outings, they wouldn’t be writing mea culpas about their Biden age and health coverage months after he left office.

The new Biden books aren’t being written by conservatives or partisan Republicans. Before Tapper and Thompson, one came from Tyler Pager of the New York Times, Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal, and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post. It’s also a big part of another book written by Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of the Hill.

Some of these books are even sympathetic to Democratic political interests. For whom was Biden’s decision to seek reelection “disastrous,” if not the Democrats?

The latest devastating health news for Biden should be handled sensitively and compassionately. People should fervently hope he makes a full recovery.

But if the point of all fresh reporting on Biden is to help learn from past mistakes, the answer cannot be to ignore new questions or change the subject. 

“Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or at some point in the future,” is how Vance prefaced his comments to reporters.

WHO WAS FOOLED BY THE BIDEN DECLINE COVER-UP? NOT THE VOTERS 

“We really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job,” he said.

Hopefully, that conversation will happen before new books lamenting old Biden coverage decisions are published years from now.