Karine Jean-Pierre slammed by Democrats for bad Biden answers 

Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, is participating in a media tour to promote her new book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.” But her numerous appearances with otherwise ideologically friendly interviewers — Stephen Colbert, Tim Miller, Gayle King — have not gone well, for a very specific reason: she has no satisfying answer to the question on everyone’s minds. 

That question, which has rightly been put to her every single time she appears on television, is: How could you not have known the president was in such bad shape? When King asked her version of the question, Jean-Pierre responded thusly.  

“We’re not going to say ‘oh he didn’t age,’ he aged. And he poked fun at it, we always owned up. … When we talk about the mental acuity, and I take this very very seriously, I never saw anyone who wasn’t there, I saw someone who was always engaged.” 

For Colbert, Jean-Pierre conceded that Biden’s June debate performance was disappointing, but maintained that she had always seen the president in complete command of his faculties. And then with Miller, Jean-Pierre demurred and admitted she “could not speak” to whether Biden was well enough to serve as president until 2028.  

Seriously, why is KJP putting herself through this? 

The uncomfortable and unavoidable fact of the matter is that the news media — conservative and mainstream — had already taken notice of Biden’s diminished mental acuity well before the debate. A majority of the American people had noticed it. A majority of Democrats had noticed it. The difficulty of concealing Biden’s decline was such that the president’s innermost circle shielded him from press scrutiny, kept the Cabinet at bay, and scheduled can’t-miss meetings with legislators during the periods of time throughout the day at which he was sharpest. She was the press secretary, and she didn’t notice any of this? It’s frankly unbelievable, unless she was unusually out of the loop.  

She certainly isn’t claiming she was out of the loop, however. One wonders, then, why she would bother telling her story in book format, and discussing it on national television, if she cannot honestly reckon with these incredible shortcomings. 

Now she says she’s become an independent — she no longer identifies as a Democrat, mostly because, it seems, she doesn’t like how the Democratic Party treated Joe Biden. I guess she thinks they should have stuck by their man, and lost even worse to Donald Trump? 

Again, it’s hard to take any of this seriously, and she basically seems like she’s performing a stunt, aimed at selling books. But if she’s not going to grapple honestly with how she could have missed what many of you did not miss — even from a much greater distance — then, I’m not sure why we should care what she has to say.  

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but she was the primary comms person for a president who had lost the ability to coherently speak for himself. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.