Full-blown crisis puts Biden on his heels. An inside look at campaign's pitfalls.
WASHINGTON – His walk is now a slow, stiff gait.
His voice is softer, harder to hear. He has always spoken in tortured syntax, but his words now run together with alarming frequency. Thoughts repeatedly abandon him midsentence.
President Joe Biden's advanced age and mental acuity – once a punchline for Republicans and late-night comics – are now at the center of a growing political crisis that has upended his reelection bid, threatening to bring his five-decade career to an abrupt close.
Rattled Democrats fear the issue is so great that he'll be unable to defeat even a convicted felon ? former President Donald Trump.
Some are pushing him to get out of the race. Big donors are threatening to put their money elsewhere. Democratic leaders are scrambling to contain the damage before the party convenes in Chicago in just a little over five weeks to formally choose its nominee.
The current panic seemed to begin with Biden's disastrous debate against Trump at the end of June. But warning signs were there five months earlier when special prosecutor Robert Hur dropped his bombshell report over Biden’s handling of classified materials.
Hur spent a year investigating how documents with classified markings ended up in a garage in Biden’s Delaware home and at an office in Washington. His long-awaited Feb. 8 report cleared Biden of wrongdoing and concluded he should face no criminal charges.
But the report contained an explosive revelation. Hur, who had personally interviewed Biden, wrote that the 81-year-old president had been unable to remember key details of important events, including the date when his oldest son died of brain cancer. Biden was, in Hur’s words, a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” a visibly angry Biden told reporters in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, just hours after Hur’s report was released. “I’m the president, and I put this country back on its feet."
The president went on to emphasize: "My memory is fine.”
Biden and his inner circle summarily dismissed Hur’s report. But it offered the first official documentation of an uncomfortable truth that had been hiding in plain sight.
Biden, already the nation’s oldest president the day he took office, was showing unsettling signs of aging.
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An aging 'gaffe machine'
Most every president leaves office looking older than just another four or eight years. Before-and-after photos document the job's toll: More gray hairs. More lines chiseled across the face.
Biden is different. The first octogenarian to hold the office, he rambles when speaking, fumbles for words and sometimes starts a sentence on one topic and ends on another.
Most jarring was his shaky performance at the June 27 debate with Trump. Biden spoke in a raspy voice. At times, he stared blankly, his mouth slightly agape. He often lost his train of thought midsentence and failed to effectively push back against Trump’s flurry of falsehoods.
It was a startlingly bad night for a man who had built a career out of his ability to connect with people through his “average Joe” persona and folksy charm.
For sure, Biden has never been the most polished of speakers. Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, he is not. Biden’s tendency to say the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time has been the stuff of legend for much of his career.
“I am a gaffe machine,” he once joked.
Four months into his presidency, a White House official told USA TODAY that many of Biden’s verbal slip-ups had been overblown by the media and had actually proved to be one of his biggest political assets. Biden’s speaking style comes across as genuine and reminds Americans that he’s a real person when people crave authenticity, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Biden to congressional Democrats: 'I am firmly committed to staying in this race'
For a while, the White House was able to keep his verbal mistakes and miscues to a minimum. His public appearances were mostly carefully choreographed events. His interactions with reporters were restricted. Biden has held fewer formal news conferences than any president since Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease five years after leaving office. His son, Ron Reagan, later wrote that his father's battle with the disease began while he was president.
The Biden team's careful stage management achieved its goal. But it limited the public’s visibility of the aging leader.
Even so, poll after poll showed the octogenarian-in-chief’s age was a major concern for voters.
Seventy-seven percent said last August that Biden was too old to be effective for four more years, according to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. More recently, 72% of registered voters, including nearly half of Biden’s own party, said in a CBS/You Gov national survey in June that they don’t believe Biden has the mental or cognitive health to serve as president.
Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, has tried to defuse the age issue by turning it into a joke.
At the black-tie White House Correspondents Dinner last year, he said he believes strongly in the First Amendment – “and not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.”
He took another self-deprecating swipe at his advancing age at a fund-raiser in California last summer. Boasting about his foreign policy credentials, he quipped, “That’s what I’ve done my whole life – for the last 270 years.”
Some verbal blunders were too egregious to laugh off.
Biden singled out Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., for her work on hunger at a White House event on Sept. 28, 2022, and asked, “Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie?” The congresswoman had died in a car wreck a month earlier.
The White House found other ways to cope with his limitations.
An aide now accompanies Biden when he walks across the tarmac from the presidential helicopter to Air Force One. After an embarrassing fall while climbing the wobbly steps of the presidential plane, he now routinely boards via a shorter, sturdier set of stairs that fold out from the belly of the aircraft.
His public appearances mostly are scheduled between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., except for campaign events closed to all but a small group of supporters.
Donors to his campaign have been struck by how stage-managed those receptions tend to be. Former Wall Street banker Marty Dolan shelled out $10,000 to attend an April fundraiser at the New York home of actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Biden spoke for about 20 minutes using a teleprompter and then took photos with only the top donors.
“He didn’t mingle with the party. He was presented at an arms-length,” Dolan said. “It raised more questions than answers.”
The debate with Trump turned the age issue into a full-blown crisis. A follow-up interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, which the White House and Biden's campaign hoped would blot out memories of the debate, failed to contain the fallout.
The interview "left us all in this sort of purgatory for the moment," Biden's former press secretary, Jen Psaki, said during her show on MSNBC.
Democrats fear not only that Biden will lose the presidency but that he will lose the Senate for the Democrats, and kill their chances of retaking the House. More than a dozen congressional Democrats have called on Biden to pull out of the race so the party can nominate someone with a better chance of winning. Others are expected to add their names.
With a firestorm over his political future still raging in Washington, a defiant Biden dismissed questions about his age at a news conference and vowed to stay in the race. The words at times contrasted with the president's tone ? his voice raspy and faint, with more than a few misstatements, even as he delved into the details of defense and economic policy.
"If I slow down and can't get the job done, that's a sign I shouldn't be doing it, but there's no indication of that yet, none," he said.
“I believe I'm the best qualified to govern, and I think I'm the best qualified to win."
Contributing: Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
Questions continue: Top Biden campaign officials huddle with Democratic lawmakers ahead of pivotal press conference
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Inside look at how full-blown crisis put Biden on his heels
