5 nights in the past, I stood on the tarmac at Dover Air Pressure Base and watched Joe Biden, sporting a darkish jacket and baseball cap, gingerly descend the staircase of Air Pressure One.
From my place within the travelling press pool, I noticed every unsteady step downward being scrutinised as intently as his acts of workplace. From the airplane emerged an inescapable scene of frailty. The human weak spot of age appeared to have overcome probably the most highly effective man on earth.
Mr Biden, 81, had simply examined optimistic for Covid. We had flown again with him from Las Vegas in what grew to become a debilitating finish to a visit meant to see him hitting the marketing campaign path with full power.
The scene at Dover, now being replayed again and again on the information channels overlaying his election exit, was his final public look earlier than he pulled out of the race on Sunday. If feels now just like the picture of the top of his candidacy.
A lot modified in per week.
Final Monday, after I and different press joined him aboard the presidential airplane for that marketing campaign journey to Nevada, the president clearly felt the Democratic nomination was nonetheless his to carry onto.
Donald Trump had dodged an murderer’s bullet two days earlier, giving Mr Biden a political reprieve from the rising calls from Congressional Democrats for him to step down from the race.
His marketing campaign hoped the journey would reinvigorate black and Hispanic voters who historically overwhelmingly again the Democrats however whose help for Mr Biden had slipped since 2020.
On Tuesday, I watched him energise a packed conference corridor with a speech to the African-American civil rights group the NAACP. I spoke to some delegates who had been actually dancing within the aisles earlier than Mr Biden’s speech. “4 extra years” echoed by the venue.
However the subsequent morning, issues started to spin uncontrolled.
The top of the highway was the Unique Lindo Michoácan Restaurant, Las Vegas, Nevada. This was a kind of extremely orchestrated marketing campaign stops the place the president mingles with voters. The press was ushered inside to seize the president’s entrance. Because the door swung open, I used to be struck by how pale he appeared, and the way a lot slower he appeared than the day earlier than as he shook palms with diners.
We shouted questions in regards to the rising record of Democrats questioning his health to run – he didn’t reply. Then we had been hustled again out to the press vans whereas he did a radio interview inside.
We waited. And waited. Within the searing Nevada warmth we spent greater than 90 minutes within the press vans with all the motorcade stalled. It was by now apparent that one thing was mistaken. Instantly, an e-mail dropped from a BBC colleague to say the host of his subsequent speech venue had introduced, on stage, that Mr Biden had simply examined optimistic for Covid.
As I attempted to method a White Home staffer to search out out what was occurring, I used to be abruptly ordered to get again in my van, and advised that we had been leaving. The motorcade started rolling and we had been dashing our manner by the suburbs of Las Vegas, vacation spot unknown. The marketing campaign was altering course. Instantly, amid the flashing lights and police outriders, the airport got here into view. The president was going dwelling to Delaware to recuperate from Covid, the marketing campaign journey was over.
Quickly his marketing campaign can be too, when he made the announcement that he was now not operating for president from his beachside dwelling simply days later.
In hindsight, his final look on the air power base in Dover appeared like a remaining try to defy the inevitable, what campaign-donor George Clooney referred to as “the battle towards time”.
On the tarmac we had requested him, one final time, about waning Democratic help. This time, he answered again: “I’m doing effectively”. It wasn’t fairly what we had requested, not likely. Perhaps he misheard us, or perhaps he meant he believed he might survive it.
It seems he couldn’t.