They’re especially good at hearing themselves as an audience does. Watch when they misspeak, as everyone does occasionally. Within two or three words, they catch themselves and utter corrections.

Not Joe Biden. Of course, he’s always been a talker, not a listener. Poke through the vast video archives of C-SPAN, a national treasure if ever there was one, and watch Biden’s failed attempts to win the presidency without the Trump crutch.

There’s Biden at a summertime ice-cream social in a small-town Iowa park. A voter initiates a conversation about some contemporary concern, often a pretty petty one.

Biden is quite alert in those old videos, displaying his extremely white dental caps. He detects a connection. And he starts talking — about his childhood, his father, his dead wife, Scranton, where he hasn’t lived since 1953 but still claims as his hometown.

There was a message in these monologues: “I’m a regular guy like you.” He does go on. And on. And on. As if any void would allow the voter to see through the cloud of words into his empty soul. “I talk, therefore I am.”

It’s very different today. Biden still talks a lot. Sometimes he talks so much, filling feared voids, that he’s two hours or more late for the next public engagement. Have you ever sat on a folding chair with nothing to see or do for two solid hours? How receptive did you finally feel?

Some politicians tend to the tardy, especially certain Democrats. Clinton and Bill Bradley, for instance. They’re so important that a crowd of little people can wait to express their adoration. Biden was two hours late for a Brussels news conference last summer to get his own words out to the world. Did he have a physical or emotional problem? Or just not care?

George and Laura Bush found late unacceptably impolite. God help the staffer who got them somewhere late or even too early and embarrassed an unready host. (I know. I worked for them.)

Joe Biden is different nowadays. Remember in the 2020 presidential campaign he’d often knock off for the day by mid-morning. Fatigue crept in. Or the meds wore off. Or both.

Now, there’s that cautious old-man gait. It’s more of a shuffle actually, not a confident stride. Biden slides one foot a half-step safely forward before transferring the weight to it.

That feels safer and avoids a stumble, setting off the thunder of camera shutters capturing another awkward moment of a man who turns 80 this year.

We see Biden scarfing ice cream a lot now. But we’re not permitted to see or hear him conversing with regular folks, not without notes. The “they” he often mentions giving him instructions on behavior will not permit that. God knows what the president might say because his elderly filter has gone and his head is fogged.

Biden has a peculiar way of thinking out loud these days. He gets to musing at times, which could be a revealing and affecting peek into the mind of the nation’s leader.

But instead, Biden’s musings have no destination. They’re just empty mental meanderings that go on. And on. With a point lost somewhere in his head. They’re often incorrect, which he fails to catch. He recalls alleged childhood memories. Careers he never had. Does he even know the truth?

Take this Biden musing about Ukraine caught on tape last week. Biden expressed puzzlement that “Putin decides he’s gonna just invade Russia.”

Biden didn’t hear, grasp, or comprehend his own nonsense. The Washington media, no longer a conscientious watchdog for citizens who’ve granted them special constitutional protections, let that embarrassment float away like another escaped birthday balloon.

So, alert Americans who happened to catch that snippet were left with yet another little example of something quite disturbing in their commander in chief.

Everyone misspeaks, of course. But there’s only one man who blithely misspeaks like that who also has access to the nuclear launch codes that could ignite the end of all human existence.

When Donald Trump blew off steam about China and the 2020 election, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley — no Trump fan apparently — felt compelled to contact his Chinese counterpart twice, secretly, to assure him that the United States was planning no attack.

Milley did not inform the U.S. commander in chief that he’d gone behind his back to contact a foreign country with the world’s largest military, revealing to China a damaging internal distrust within the American administration. A spokesman said Milley’s actions were in line “with these duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”

But no one is calling out this president for his now chronic mental lapses to maintain national stability. He’s a Democrat, after all. Biden can’t remember the Defense Secretary’s name standing right next to him. Australia’s prime minister. Calls Kamala Harris president.

Don’t Americans deserve a similar reassurance that someone is doing something about this doddering Democrat, besides leading him away from reporters by the hand like a child, as Jill so often does?

These sad snippets have been piling up now for 14 months. Here. Here. And here, among numerous other examples. Despite the media’s sympathetic cloaking, Americans are figuring things out.

Barring anything unforeseen, Joe Biden is president until Jan. 20, 2025, when he’ll be 82.

In the meantime, Americans can take matters into their own hands on election day this Nov. 8 when every House seat and 34 Senate chairs are up for election. Voters could fully freeze Biden’s legislative agenda by giving the GOP control of at least one chamber.

At this moment – key words there this moment – it looks quite likely that Republicans will regain control of the House and even the Senate, currently tied 50:50.

On the generic ballot — which party do you want running Congress? — the GOP is always behind. But not now. Republican congressional candidates have a 49-42 percent advantage over Democrats among registered voters that grows to 54-41 percent with those who say they’re both registered and certain to vote in November.

And voter intentions strongly favor Republicans and disaffected independents, the folks who drifted to Biden in 2020 over Trump antipathy.

Biden’s overall job approval began in the mid-50s, far better than Trump ever achieved. Now, it’s deeply underwater as low as 37, where Trump’s approval wallowed, with Biden disapproval at 55 percent, where his approval once was.

There are many reasons for this: Inflation, reflected in soaring gas prices now over $6 in some places, turns out to be stubbornly serious, not a brief blip, as Biden wishfully assured. And worsened by Biden’s own actions, perhaps intentionally to push electric cars.

He’s now attempting to put the pandemic and his failure to stem it in the rear-view mirror. The Biden vow to restore national unity foundered on his divisive, ineffective mandates and the harsh rhetoric of a senile mind.

Instead of earning credit as the president who ended America’s longest war, Biden’s political visage is tattooed with the searing memory of his bollixed exit with the shocking chaos, needless deaths, and abandonment of thousands, many still hostage behind Taliban lines. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan over a much smaller foreign hostage situation.

Biden’s also had to abandon his Build Back Better serial spending scheme, which turned into Build Back Bitter within his own split party.

Midterm election moods tend to set up like drying cement in election-year Spring, which is now creeping its way up the land from Florida. Republicans could, of course, seize defeat from the jaws of victory, as they did with over-confidence and over-reach on the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton impeachment in 1998.

Hunter Biden has serial scandals. But media has let the Big Guy skate on that responsibility. Politicians can indeed often recover from scandals, which grow stale and forgiven in voters’ minds.

Joe Biden’s mental problems, however, are more fundamental and unchanging. And they’re refreshed at virtually his every public appearance. It’s like hearing a time bomb with no clock ticking down to some undetermined future explosion.

“Only” 1,051 days left.