Analysis: Biden’s interview raises existential questions about his age

President Joe Biden’s struggle to prove he has the strength and cognitive capacity for a second term is turning into a painful personal and national ordeal.

Watching a visibly aged Biden answer tough questions Friday about his health on prime-time television — which would normally remain between a patient and their doctor — felt like an affront to presidential dignity. It was sad to see a person respected and loved by many Americans suffer such a situation. And it would be hard-hearted not to empathize with Biden as he confronts the painful human realities of aging in the most public way imaginable.

However, Biden’s position, his shocking performance in the presidential debate and his defiant refusal to contemplate its implications for his re-election campaign mean he is forcing the country to have this conversation.

The political tide may be turning against Biden, but the interview underscored his deep pride in a presidency that took him nearly half a century to achieve. And he’s no closer to giving up his lifelong mantra of getting up and fighting when he’s knocked down — a factor that will exacerbate the Democratic Party’s dilemma.

Although his interview performance was much stronger than the president’s often incoherent showing in the presidential debate, CNN In Atlanta, that’s not saying much. It contained no new disaster that would immediately take him out of the race. But it also did little to calm the storm raging over his campaign and raised new intrigues about his health, amid growing signs that his Democratic power base is beginning to crumble.

It is increasingly clear that the president, his party and the country are sliding inexorably into a political crisis that raises the extraordinary possibility that a presumptive nominee could be removed weeks before his party’s national convention and four months before a of the most critical elections in history.

Threats to Biden’s prospects are rapidly increasing. Two more Democratic congressmen asked the president on Friday (5) to give up the nomination to a younger candidate. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner has moved forward in an effort to get Senate Democrats on the same page about Biden’s future and is reaching a point where he thinks it’s time for Biden to suspend his campaign, a source familiar with the matter said. their efforts to CNN. And House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has scheduled a virtual meeting with party committee members as he faces growing pressure from his conference over Biden’s position, a Democratic lawmaker said.

A campaign-defined test

Biden’s campaign had scheduled the interview with ABC News to try to prove that the president’s shaky debate performance last week was an aberration and to quell growing doubts about his standing as his party’s 2024 nominee.

He seemed more composed and fluent than in the debate on CNN. He made a much stronger case for his own successes in office and made an argument against Trump more effectively than he did in the debate. And he has dug in, despite calls from some Democratic lawmakers for him to drop his re-election bid and growing panic among many others who have yet to break cover.

He also dismissed concerns about his health, insisting he was no more frail than before.

“I don’t think anyone is more qualified to be president or win this race than me,” Biden said in the interview in the swing state of Wisconsin.

“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I would get out of the race,” Biden said, but added, “The Lord Almighty will not come down.”

But Biden’s admission that he felt “terrible” in the days before his showdown with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump only raised new questions about his health. These questions come at a time of growing anxiety that he is well enough at age 81 to handle the grueling demands of the presidency and the strain of a re-election bid.

Biden compounded those doubts by appearing unsure about whether he had watched a recording of the debate — “I don’t think so,” he said when asked — there were times when he got stuck on some sentences. And he added yet another explanation for his poor performance in the debate, to add to his allies’ claims that he was overloaded with facts by officials, jet-lagged and suffering from a cold. The president said Trump’s insistence on speaking, even with the microphone turned off, discouraged him.

Asked if he was the same man who took office three years ago, Biden deflected and offered a litany of his achievements. “In terms of success, yes,” he said. “I was also the guy who created a peace plan for the Middle East that may be coming to fruition. I was also the guy who expanded NATO. I was also the guy who made the economy grow. All the individual things that were done were ideas that I had or that I realized. I moved on.”

The president was adamant that the debate was just “a bad night,” for which he took responsibility. But more than a week after the event, and amid growing fear among Democrats about their prospects in November and the possibility of what it will mean for democracy if Trump wins a second term, one thing has become increasingly clear: one night bad performance on such an important stage in front of millions of viewers could be enough to irreparably damage the campaign of the president who will turn 82 two weeks after Election Day, who the vast majority of Americans fear will be unable to serve and who is calling for the country to keep him in office until January 2029.

Americans are worried about the next four years

Biden and his supporters warn that his painful 90 minutes on stage in Atlanta should not overshadow the achievements of his presidency. And they say the threat posed by Trump and his autocratic instincts and promise to dedicate a second presidency to “retribution” far outweigh concerns about Biden’s ability.

But the question millions of Americans are asking has less to do with reviewing the legacy of Biden’s first term and more about whether he can function during four more grueling years in the White House.

The interview also raised the question of whether the president is fully aware of the corrosive impact of the debate on confidence among Democrats about his chances of defeating Trump. He sparred with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos over polls that showed him trailing even further behind the former president nationally and in swing states.

The interview was one of a series of events, including Friday’s rally and a planned press conference at next week’s NATO summit in Washington, that the campaign saw as moments to prove Biden’s fitness.

But Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman of California told CNN that the president needed to do an extended, live interview on television, unlike the one recorded on ABC. Other members are demanding the president get out much more to prove his resilience, even though Friday’s campaign promised an “aggressive” program of events in July.

But that promise did not stop growing demands for Biden to step aside.

“President Biden has done our country a tremendous service, but now is the time for him to follow in the footsteps of one of our founding fathers, George Washington, and step aside to allow new leaders to rise up and compete against Donald Trump,” said the Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton told Boston radio station WBUR in an interview that was released before the ABC interview aired. And Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley said Biden’s continued presence in the race has “almost no hope of success.”

“I would say, Mr. President, your legacy is set. We owe you the greatest debt of gratitude. The only thing you can do now to cement this for good and avoid a total catastrophe is to resign and let someone else do it,” Quigley told MSNBC. Later he added in CNN: “What we need now — and what I think takes courage — is to step back and recognize that the president of the United States does not have the stamina to overcome the deficit here and that will affect us all.”

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey didn’t go that far, but said in a statement to CNN that Biden needed to “carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope for defeating Trump. Whatever President Biden decides, I am committed to doing everything in my power to defeat Donald Trump.”

The agony over Biden’s fate is especially painful for Democrats because many of them believe the president has done a good job reviving the post-Covid-19 economy, boosting job growth, taking advantage of U.S. allies abroad and approving infrastructure. faces and plans to combat climate change. But increasingly, it appears that fear of a Trump term may be overwhelming satisfaction with Biden’s achievements.

To alleviate these concerns, Biden used the rally to move away from questions about his age to try to refocus attention on what he actually did in office.

“I keep seeing all these stories about being too old,” he said. “Let me tell you something. I wasn’t too old to create more than 15 million new jobs. To ensure 21 million Americans are insured under the Affordable Care Act. Was I too old to release student debt for nearly 5 million Americans? Too old to put the first black woman on the Supreme Court of the United States of America?”

After the debate, Biden’s every word is under intense scrutiny and risks reinforcing a critical narrative about his age and mental acuity after having burned into viewers’ minds the image of a struggling president diminished by age.

So a fatalistic statement in the ABC interview about how he would feel next January if Trump won is likely to inflame many Democrats’ concerns about his mindset, his understanding of his situation and what will happen in November.

“I’ll feel like as long as I’ve given it my all and done the ‘best’ job I know I can do, that’s what it’s all about,” Biden said.

The Biden campaign later contacted the CNN to argue that the president had not said “more good” and ABC News changed the interview transcript to read “I did the best job I know I can do.” The editor’s note said the transcript had been “updated for clarity.” The audio of the sentence is not conclusive on the issue. But the situation underlined the extent to which every word the president utters after the debate is under the highest scrutiny.

This content was originally created in English.

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