Believe it or not, there’s more going on than just a virus.   There are people running for president.

Full disclosure here: I’m not a Joe Biden supporter.  That’s because of his past policies and his current stand on important issues.  He’s a likeable guy.  I would go so far as to say that it’s almost impossible not  to like him. But supporters of the Democrat candidate deserve to know the ramifications of his candidacy and consider them.

Knowing our history is important. Listening to older people who have a sense of what has happened before looms large.  We may be too old to run for president, but our knowledge is pure gold, should young voters wish to take advantage of it.  Generally speaking, we’re not as quick as we were.  But we’re much more careful.

In private conversations with my friends, I’ve stated several times that I feel like history is repeating itself, and perhaps it’s time to “go public” with it.  Joe Biden’s choice of a vice-presidential candidate may be critical.  Should Biden be elected, it may be one of those decisions about which we ultimately say “Wow, if only we’d realized how important that was at the time.”

In 1944, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for his fourth term, he was virtually unbeatable.  He was also in extremely precarious health and most of the country didn’t know it.  The truth, however, was very evident to party leaders and insiders of the time. In those days, as today, the vice-presidential candidate was selected by the party convention, but the candidate’s views carried a great deal of weight in that decision. While a majority of our country was not aware of FDR’s poor health, the Democrat leadership was frightened by it. They knew that FDR would win the election.  They were aware that he would likely not survive another four years.  It wasn’t talked about, but within the party leadership, they could see FDR dying right before their eyes. They knew that in selecting a vice-presidential candidate, they were likely naming the next president.

Henry Wallace was the sitting vice-president.  Wallace leaned far to the left and was regarded as “a Socialist” or a “near-Communist.”  A frightened Democrat leadership pressured FDR to dump Wallace and move right with his selection, toward the center of the party.  In July of 1944, the convention accepted FDR’s choice of Harry Truman as his running mate. In nine months, Roosevelt was dead at 63 years of age and Truman took the oath of office as President. In a nutshell, that’s what happened.

Biden is 77 years old.  He has suffered two known burst brain aneurisms. He has also experienced “leaking” from aneurisms, known as sub-conjunctival hemorrhages. I’m not a doctor.  But I’m honestly frightened and concerned that Joe Biden may have hidden aneurism issues or is displaying the first signs of impending dementia.  Having dealt with this in my own family, I don’t wish it on Democrats or my worst enemy.

Biden has long been ridiculed for his public “gaffes.”  I don’t fault him there.  Any candidate who is being rushed from state to state, city to city and expected to remember where he is and what day it is will ultimately fail the test and offer the media some regrettable blunders.  The extent of the candidate’s misstatements is directly related to the media’s eagerness to hear them. Biden has had the misfortune of a press that hungers for his errors.  It is perhaps important, though, to consider the physical stamina required in a presidential campaign, not to mention the physical and mental stress of the presidency itself.

Far more concerning than “gaffes” are his age, health history and recurring tendency to lose his train of thought, mid-sentence.  Were he to win the presidency and a subsequent re-election, he would be nearly 90 before leaving office.  I’ll put it bluntly: the odds of him reaching the end of his first term are not good.  Things are looking awfully (and I chose that word carefully) familiar.

Today, the Democrat candidate is not being pressured to move toward the center.  He’s already there.  Rather, the “smart money” says he needs the Bernie Sanders supporters; he has to move left, toward the radicalized Sanders and the Jihad Squad.  Couple that with Biden’s health. It’s not a stretch to imagine a successor president very few of us expected.

Truman’s legacy survived.  He’s now regularly listed as one of the ten best presidents in U.S. history.  This is a wonderful country, but I suspect we’ll not get another Truman.