Democratic heavyweights and lawmakers began publicly questioning Joe Biden’s fitness on Tuesday, as the White House and the president himself tried, with little 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 mid-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 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.
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,” said the influential former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on Joe Biden’s favorite channel, 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 Rep. 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 back”
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 “travelled around the world several times” shortly before the confrontation, and that this had led him to “almost fall asleep on stage”, adding: “This is not an excuse but 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 assured, ruling out the possibility that the Democratic leader, deemed fit to govern by his doctor in February, would take a cognitive test.
The US president will give an interview to ABC News on Friday and the White House is promising a solo press conference next week, two events meant to prove that Joe Biden can speak fluently without a teleprompter.
Survey
According to a poll published Tuesday by CNN, 75% of voters questioned believe that the Democratic Party would have a better chance in November with a candidate other than him.
Donald Trump is credited with 49% of the national vote, against 43% for his rival, a gap unchanged from the last poll of this type, conducted in April.
Vice President Kamala Harris, without winning, would be better placed, at 45% against 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, even though she did not answer them head-on.
The spokeswoman assured that the American executive was “absolutely not” hiding information about the president’s health.