Appearing at a last-minute news conference Thursday evening, President Biden hoped to convince the country of his mental capacity, hours after he was scathingly described in a special counsel report as a “well-intentioned, elderly man with a poor memory.” ”
Instead, a visibly annoyed Mr. Biden made exactly the kind of verbal gaffes that have been making Democrats so nervous for months, mistakenly referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the “President of Mexico,” as he intended to address him in response to the latest developments War in Gaza.
The special counsel’s report and the president’s evening lecture brought Mr. Biden’s advanced age, the deeply uncomfortable issue that emerged in his re-election bid, back to the center of American political discussion.
The 81-year-old president – already the oldest in the country’s history – has been fighting for years against the impression that he is a diminished figure. “My memory is fine,” he emphasized from the White House on Thursday.
But in a single succinct sentence, the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, captured the fears of Democrats who hold their breath whenever Mr. Biden appears in public Republican hopes to the point, particularly former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. The Trump operation has made clear its intention to use Mr. Biden’s stiffer gait and sometimes garbled speech to portray him as weak.
The Biden campaign’s strategy is based on telling voters that the November election represents a choice between the president, no matter what doubts the public has about his age, and an opponent in Mr. Trump, 77, whom they see as Threats to democracy and privacy freedoms.
The Democrats chose Mr. Biden a long time ago. With no serious alternative in the primary, many in the party believe the country’s future depends on the president’s ability to convince voters that he is up for another four years.
But for all of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities — the Republican Party has been on a protracted losing streak since he took office — the more than $2 billion that the Biden campaign and its allies plan to raise and spend will not make the current president any younger .
And Thursday night’s news conference was an example of the political dangers facing Mr. Biden, whose missteps are compounded in part by the White House team’s tight control over his media presence. His advisers are so risk-averse that they even took part in a pre-Super Bowl interview this weekend before one of the largest annual television audiences in the country.
“Fair or not, you can’t ring the bell,” said David Axelrod, the former Barack Obama strategist who has become a leading figure in the Democratic Party, warning about how voters judge Mr. Biden’s age. Mr. Axelrod said the special counsel’s report was so troubling to Democrats because it “goes to the heart of what’s currently plaguing Biden politically, which is the widespread fear that he’s not up to it.”
He added: “The most damaging things in politics are the things that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions, and those are the things that spread very quickly. It’s a problem.”
The Biden campaign declined to comment.
From a legal perspective, Mr. Hur’s report cleared Mr. Biden of criminal wrongdoing and announced that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. But Democrats used his loaded language — Mr. Hur also cited Mr. Biden’s “declining abilities with age” as something that would have been favorable to a jury — to accuse the special counsel, once appointed by Trump, of partisan motives.
For Republicans seeking to oust Mr. Biden, the report and the president’s angry response were a gift after several days of their own dysfunction in Congress dominating the news. The Republican National Committee quickly created a graphic with the report’s eight most brutal words — “well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory” — grafted onto the Biden campaign logo.
Not to mention that the special counsel has refused to indict Mr. Biden, while Mr. Trump’s own, more serious case about whether he mishandled classified documents remains part of the 91 felony charges he faces in four jurisdictions.
Still, Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top strategists, called the special counsel’s description of Mr. Biden “devastating and defining.”
“The report confirms what Americans have been seeing on their television screens for several years – that an elderly man with a poor memory is leading America into a quagmire of wars, inflationary catastrophes and a lack of opportunity for taxpaying Americans,” LaCivita said.
Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is close to Mr. Biden, predicted he would receive more calls from “people expressing concern.” But he said he would respond by recounting his first-hand experiences with Mr. Biden, which he said showed the president was “astute, committed and determined.”
Still, Mr. Biden’s mix-up of Egypt and Mexico came shortly after several gaffes last week regarding deceased European leaders. During a campaign exchange in Nevada, he initially confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996, with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then on Wednesday he pointed out twice that in 2021 he met with Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor who died in 2017, and not with Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.
Mr. Coons mocked “the calls I get from freaked out Democrats: ‘Oh my God, the president said X!'” I’m thinking, “And the former president said Y!” If you asked Donald Trump If you asked who François Mitterrand was, he would ask you: ‘What are you talking about?'”
Mr. Trump has made his own series of verbal stumbles — he recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and previously confused the leaders of Hungary and Turkey — but polls show that voters do not question his sharpness in the same way that of Mr. Biden. An NBC News poll released this week found that voters gave Mr. Trump a 16 percentage point lead on the question of who was more competent and effective — a 25-point increase since 2020, when Mr. Biden had a nine-point lead in this Ask.
Ms. Haley has argued that a new generation would better serve the country and both parties. “The first party to withdraw its 80-year-old candidate will win this election!” she wrote in a fundraising email Thursday.
Mr. Biden’s advisers privately stressed that suggestions that his memory was failing would not harm him because voters had already factored in his age when considering whether to support him against Mr. Trump. Some of the president’s allies on Thursday dusted off a playbook used by previous presidents facing investigations: Attack investigators because they are motivated by partisan politics.
Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said Mr. Hur did not have the expertise to assess Mr. Biden’s memory.
“The people writing this report are lawyers, not doctors,” Garcia said. “This person is a Republican who couldn’t find any evidence. He’s probably trying to harm the president politically.”
For many Democrats, the episode was an unwelcome echo of the approach to the 2016 election. James B. Comey, then the FBI director, held a news conference that summer in which he said he would not attack Hillary Clinton for using one private email server, but still criticized her verdict – and then, months later, reopened the matter to his investigation in the days before the election.
“This brings back the pre-Clinton-Trump 11 days for many of us,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist who predicted Mr. Biden’s troubles would be over because the election is still far away. “The blessing for Biden is that he was old before this report, he will be old after this report. We all knew he was old.”
The special counsel’s report was surprisingly blunt. It described Mr. Biden’s memory as appearing to have “significant limitations,” described an interview he recorded in 2017 as “painfully slow,” and said Mr. Biden remembered some key dates of his vice presidency or “when his son Beau died.” couldn’t remember. ”
In a letter to the special counsel, Mr. Biden’s lawyers called the numerous references to Mr. Biden’s memory “baseless” and “prejudicial and inflammatory.” And Mr. Biden himself, with visible frustration, expressed his disbelief at the notion that he didn’t know when his son had died: “How the hell dare he bring that up?”
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman, a New York Democrat and former federal prosecutor, said the attention that Biden’s Mexico-Egypt gaffe immediately drew was a “perfect example of the age issue being completely blown out of proportion and blown out of proportion.”
Mr. Biden almost certainly remains the Democratic nominee. He handily won his party’s early nominating contests, and qualifying deadlines for the Democratic primary have passed in about 80 percent of states and territories.
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Mr. Biden’s only remaining Democratic primary candidate, has found little support so far. Mr. Phillips said the special counsel’s description of Mr. Biden’s memory shows that “the president is unfit to continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025.”
James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, said negative perceptions of Mr. Biden’s age should not be dismissed as a distraction.
“The public doesn’t look at his age as — that’s not a Fox News issue,” he said in an interview after the news conference. “It’s not Taylor Swift manipulating the Super Bowl. So – I don’t know how you get out of this.”
“The whole day,” he added, “confirmed existing suspicions.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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2024-02-09 10:03:48
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