Nobody Remembers This

In the wake of President Biden's fall at the Air Force Academy and his subsequent near-accident on Marine One, nobody has mentioned Jimmy Carter's September 16, 1979 collapse during a cross-country race near Camp David.

The incident occurred just 200 yards past the entrance to Camp David as Carter neared the top of the second major hill on the course. Between 800 and 900 runners were participating in the event.

Lt. Col. Paul Kramer of Washington, who was jogging close behind Carter, told United Press International he saw "his legs collapse. He looked in pretty bad shape. His head was down, and he just looked lousy."

Ther story had more details:

Carter, wobbly and moaning, was kept from collapsing by security men who held him erect as he staggered to the top of a long hill in the fourth mile of the Catoctin Mountains race.

Colman McCarthy, a Washington Post reporter who was running in pace with Carter, described the president as "ashen" and in distress.

Carter was assisted to a golf cart, where the White House physician, Dr. William Lukash, examined him and urged the president not to run any farther. He moved to a White House car and was driven into Camp David to recover.

Earlier that summer, July 15, Carter had given his "malaise" speech. That August, he'd taken a week-long cruise on a Mississippi steamboat that editorial cartoons at the time portrayed as a hyped-up but effective end to his presidency. Oddly, web searches on all these episodes suggest the airbrush artists have been hard at work. Discussions of the malaise speech say he never used the word, but I watched it, and I remember it clearly. Possibly he ad-libbred something that wasn't in the text. However it happened, everyone called it the maiaise speech.

By the same token, accounts of the riverboat cruise are strangely bland, when reaction in the country at the time, at least as I remember it, was that the trip was oddly irrelevant. Web searches on "Carter riverboat cruise cartoon" come up empty.

The problem is that presidential falls, or falls by presidential candidates, are news. Gerald Ford's knee gave way in 1975 on a trip to Austria, and he tumbled down the stairs of Air Force One. Bill Cinton fell going down steps at a party in 1997 under circumstances that have never been clear. Hillary stumbled and had to be bundled into a van during a 9/11 event in 2016. Ford's, Carter's, and Hillary's falls all either augured or influenced the outcome of their respective elections. Politico, even while trying to minimize Biden's own fall, commented,

Questions about Biden’s age can’t be shaken. And clips like the ones that came Thursday don’t help with the White House’s task of trying to dismiss those subterranean concerns from within the party.

Even after a successful midterm election cycle last fall, Biden’s approval rating remains stuck around 40 percent. And recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans would prefer a different Democratic candidate next year. Perhaps as much as the economy, national security or cultural issues, it is Biden’s age that could be a determining factor for voters. That’s true even if Republicans renominate former President Donald Trump, who is 76.

Jimmy Casrter was 55 when he fell in 1979. Gerald Ford was 62. Joe Biden is 80.

And Biden is about the last of the dwindling generation of elderly Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein who've been able to maintain a facade of respectability for the party that's lost the New Deal coalition of ethnics, Catholics, and labor in favvor of black separitists, parlor leftists, the urban criminal class, and radical queers. The national mood is sour. The visuals, at least for now, aren't good.