One of my treasured friends in journalism was the late Frank Jackman. Frank, an ex-UPI overnight editor, was the Washington Bureau news editor of the New York Daily News when I was the paper’s White House correspondent and later national political correspondent.

            He once told me how, when he was a kid in Massachusetts, he saw President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a campaign stop—and how FDR’s aides would lift the paralyzed president out of his car “like a sack of potatoes” and lock his leg braces so he could stand at a podium to address the crowd.

            By mutual consent, no one in the press ever photographed this, and if they did the pictures would never have been published. And back then Roosevelt’s infirmity never became a real campaign issue.

            Just imagine if FDR had been running against Donald Trump.

            Trump, a craven bag of guts with no moral or human core, doubtless would have lambasted his opponent as “crippled Franklin,” and claimed that only he (Trump) had the stamina and strength to run the country.

            I could not help but think of this Thursday evening as a frankly diminished—and I hate to say it, doddering—Joe Biden failed to hold back a cataract of lies and outright bullshit coming out of Trump’s mouth as CNN’s two debate moderators looked on like stoics.

            It is obvious now that Biden no longer is capable of running for, much less winning, re-election.

            He is a good and decent man who brought this country back from four disastrous years of Donald Trump. Even before taking office, Joe Biden guided us past the traitorous insurrection that Trump fomented, trying to overturn the 2020 election and, with it, our democracy.

            His place in history is secure.

            But now, Mr. President, it is time to go—to withdraw from the 2024 race and release your delegates to support a more vigorous, capable, candidate than you are.

             With respect to Biden’s supporters, only the foolish or gullible can think that “Joe just had a bad night,” hoping that he can rebound and erase from public memory the worst presidential debate performance in history. The damage is done, and it will be broadcast ad nauseum by the Trump camp from now until election day if Biden persists in his diminished candidacy.

      Noted New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg: “I was very struck by this statement that Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, gave to an Associated Press reporter Friday morning about Biden: ‘Until he articulates a way forward in terms of his vision for America at this moment, I’m going to reserve comment about anything relative to where we are at this moment, other than to say I stand behind the ticket.’ That is not something you say if you think everyone is overreacting.”

            The easiest—and most honorable—path is for the president to announce his withdrawal from the race and release his delegates. This would, in turn, lead to an open Democratic National Convention, beginning Aug. 19 in Chicago, and give all contenders—including, one assumes, incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris—a chance to vie for the nomination in open floor debate.

            This would be unusual but not unprecedented. In March of 1968, president Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew his candidacy for re-election in the face of huge opposition to his handling of the Vietnam war. [The Democratic nominee, Johnson’s Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, lost in a squeaker election to Republican Richard M. Nixon—who in 1974 would become the only president to resign in disgrace, over his involvement in covering up the GOP-led wiretap and bugging of the Democratic National Committee, then headquartered in the Watergate Office Building in Washington.]

            It’s time, Joe. Your country needs you to do the right thing—again.