Joe Biden has cancer, and it has spread to his bones. Anyone who can't begin there should stop reading. The disease is aggressive, treatment is hard, and a man in his eighties who says some days are worse than others deserves the same decency we would want for our own fathers. Cutting back a book tour is not a scandal.
But compassion and accounting are separate obligations, and the Democratic Party keeps confusing them. Biden's illness does not close the question of how he and his inner circle handled 2024. The Left should not let sympathy become an amnesty.
Here is what the book is selling: a four-year presidency, a chapter on Jan. 6, a chapter on Trump's refusal to accept defeat, and an account of why Biden finally stepped aside. That last chapter is the one that matters. He didn't leave when voters were still free to choose a successor. He left after a debate in June 2024 that made his condition impossible to deny, giving Kamala Harris about 107 days to introduce herself, build a campaign and beat a man who had spent years preparing for a rematch. She lost. Trump is back, and the people paying for it are not the former president or the aides who shielded him.
They are the federal workers whose agencies are being gutted and the families living with the new immigration crackdown. They are the communities that were counting on clean-energy investment and now watch it being clawed back. The Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure law and the insulin cap were real achievements, the kind the Left spent decades demanding. Much of that work is now being dismantled by an administration that Biden's own stubbornness helped return to power. His memoir criticizes Trump's second-term actions on climate, immigration and federal funding. Those criticisms are accurate. But it is hard to warn the country about a fire when your own decision helped pass the matches.
The defense is familiar: he was a good president, age is not disqualifying, and Democrats shouldn't relitigate. The first point is partly true. The second is true in general and irrelevant here. The third is how parties repeat their mistakes. A party that treats the question as impolite will answer it the same way next time, with loyalty to the person ahead of loyalty to the voters.
The Left has its own accounts to settle with this presidency. For many of us, the Gaza war remains a moral stain that did real electoral damage. Yes, the administration paused one shipment of heavy bombs in May 2024 and attached conditions to certain offensive weapons over Rafah. But that was a late, partial and narrow gesture, and the broader flow of American arms continued while the civilian death toll climbed. No memoir will fix that. We were told to be quiet about it too, because the stakes were too high and the alternative was too dangerous. The same logic shielded a diminished candidate. Fear of Trump was used to shut down legitimate questions inside our own coalition, and those questions turned out to be right.
A book tour would have been one more place to ask them. It would have been a chance for interviewers to press on who knew what, when, and why no one with real authority forced a primary. I'm not suggesting his illness is a convenient excuse. I'm saying the effect is that fewer people will put those questions to him directly, and the book will have the field largely to itself.
So wish him well, and mean it. Then read the memoir the way you'd read any account written by the main figure in a disaster: for what it explains, and for what it leaves out. The best thing Democrats can do for Biden's legacy is to stop protecting it from scrutiny. His real accomplishments are strong enough to survive an honest reckoning, and the party's future depends on having one.
