The crisis related to the president’s age is causing a stir in the Democratic camp. Several heavyweights and parliamentarians began, on Tuesday, July 2, to publicly question Joe Biden’s state of health, while the White House and the president himself are trying without much success to contain the fire.
“I am hopeful that he will make the difficult and painful decision to step down. I respectfully call on him to do so,” wrote Texan Lloyd Doggett in the middle of the day. The Democratic congressman is the first to publicly call for the president to throw in the towel.
Faced with the angst that is flaring in her party, Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that she was “proud” to be the president’s “running mate.” “Joe Biden is our nominee, we beat Donald Trump once and we will beat him again,” she told CBS News.
A calamitous debate
An optimism that is rare in the Democratic camp, very shaken by the calamitous debate last Thursday, during which the 81-year-old Democrat lost ground to his Republican rival Donald Trump.
“I think it’s fair to ask whether this is just an episode or a lasting state,” the influential former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said on Joe Biden’s favorite network, MSNBC. “The truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump. I know it’s hard, but I think the debate has done too much damage,” said Washington State Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
On Wednesday, Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with the nation’s Democratic governors, according to the official White House schedule. “We’ll have a healthy discussion with the president,” one of them, JB Pritzker of Illinois, told CNN Tuesday night.
“Right now, Joe Biden is our candidate, I’m 100% behind him, unless he makes another decision, in which case we’ll all discuss the best course of action,” the governor added.
“Bounce”
Joe Biden offered a new explanation for the disastrous 90 minutes during a meeting with Democratic donors near Washington. He said it was “not very smart” to have “traveled around the world several times” shortly before the confrontation, and that it had led him to “almost fall asleep on stage,” adding: “That’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation.”
The American president visited France from June 5 to 9, then Italy from June 12 to 14, followed by a campaign trip to California. He then took six days to prepare for the June 27 debate at the Camp David residence, a period during which he had no public activity.
Until now, the argument of his supporters was to say that Joe Biden had had a “bad evening”, therefore temporary, and to emphasize that he was suffering from a “cold” hampering his speech, which his spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre repeated again on Tuesday.
The president “knows how to bounce back,” she said, ruling out the possibility that the Democratic leader, who was deemed fit to govern by his doctor in February, would undergo a cognitive test. The American president will give an interview to ABC News on Friday and the White House has promised a solo press conference next week, two events meant to prove that Joe Biden can speak fluently without a teleprompter.
Bad poll for Joe Biden
According to a CNN poll released Tuesday, 75 percent of voters say the Democratic Party would have a better chance in November with a candidate other than him. Donald Trump is receiving 49 percent of the national vote, compared to 43 percent for his rival, a gap unchanged from the last such poll, conducted in April.
Vice President Kamala Harris, while not winning, would be better placed, at 45% compared to 47% for the 78-year-old former Republican president. The New York Times reported Tuesday that people close to the president have noted “more frequent” and “more pronounced” absences in recent months.
Questions about the mental acuity of the oldest president in the history of the United States are “legitimate,” Karine Jean-Pierre insisted on Tuesday, failing to answer them head-on. The spokesperson assured that the American executive was “absolutely not” hiding information about the president’s fitness.