The 82-year-old, sometimes referred to ‘Sleepy Joe,’ is eager to help Democrats revitalize their tarnished brand
Great news, Republicans.
Joe Biden, the 82-year-old former president who was forced to step aside due to incompetence after bragging about beating Medicare on a debate stage, is eager to return to politics. NBC News reports that “Sleepy Joe” and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, have been reaching out to Democratic leaders and offering to help the party “regain its viability” and revitalize its tarnished brand. The former president relayed this offer last month during a private meeting with Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee. Alas, the overture “seems to have fallen flat,” not least due to Biden’s hard-earned reputation as a bumbling geezer and relic of the past who often struggles to form coherent sentences.
“Who’s going to want Joe Biden back in the game?” an anonymous Biden supporter told NBC. Sleepy Joe is undoubtedly the most unpopular president in modern history, but the Democratic Party might be even more unpopular. Just 27 percent of registered voters said they viewed the party positively, according to a recent NBC poll. Another survey by CNN found that just 58 percent of Kamala Harris voters had a favorable view of the party. It is not clear what Biden thinks he could bring to the table, especially when it comes to helping Democrats improve their standing among young voters, many of whom were born after Biden celebrated his 30th year of service in the Senate.
Jill Biden, widely believed to have been secretly running the country throughout much of her husband’s four-year term in office, is also raring to return to action. The former first lady, 73, reportedly played a key role in forcing Sleepy Joe to run for reelection. “She likes power. She wants to stay. She wants some sense of revenge,” historian Douglas Brinkley said of the first lady in February 2024. The Bidens are reportedly livid at Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and the Democrats, including the Obamas, whom they view as having led the charge to force him off the Democratic ticket. Vengeance could be a primary factor motivating their prospective return to the political fray.
The Bidens, a notoriously petty and vindictive couple, are also planning to write memoirs about their time in office. Joe is reportedly struggling to develop a “theme” for his book but has been discussing the project with former administration officials such as Jake Sullivan, the zombie-faced national security adviser frequently described as the “Forrest Gump of American decline and foreign policy disasters.” Time is of the essence, especially if Biden would like to finish the book before dying from a fall or due to natural causes. He may also be eager to finish before his former boss, Barack Obama, can publish the second volume of his post-White House memoir.
Obama is the first American president since Dwight Eisenhower to require multiple volumes to recount his time in office. The first volume, A Promised Land, came out in 2020 and clocked in at 768 pages. Obama has said he hopes to finish the second volume by the end of 2025, nearly eight years after leaving office. By the time he entered the White House in 2009, the infamously self-obsessed community activist had already published two memoirs about the importance of his life.
