WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s approach to deflecting questions about his age has pivoted from “watch me” to vouch for me.
In the days since special counsel Robert Hur released a report that described Biden’s memory as “significantly limited,” presidential appointees and friendly lawmakers have been stepping forward one by one to attest to his acuity.
Biden asks “pertinent questions” and cares about “minute details,” they’ve told news outlets. He is “very engaging” and detail-oriented. The White House went so far as to put out a memo name-checking senior officials from both parties who’ve said they found Biden to be mentally sharp.
For all the people vouching for Biden, some prominent Democrats aren’t persuaded that the approach will ease concerns about his cognitive abilities. They worry that a protective White House staff has bubble-wrapped Biden in ways that tend to distance him from people who appreciate his humanity, flaws and all.
“You need to let Joe Biden be Joe Biden,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., said on “The Chuck ToddCast,” taped Tuesday.
Biden has nine months before the election — time enough to refine his strategy and see if Hur’s report fades in peoples’ minds. For now, though, the special counsel has pushed to the fore Biden’s biggest electoral vulnerability — his age — and opened a high-stakes debate about his capabilities.
“The special counsel said the quiet part out loud,” said one former Democratic House member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering allies.
This former lawmaker recalled being in meetings with Biden, including a bicameral session at the White House three years ago, when he rambled off-topic and appeared to be lost in the nostalgia of his time in Congress.
“I think I share some of the concerns of the American people,” the former lawmaker said, using the plot line of a 1980s film to make a point. “Because if it’s really ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ who are the two guys carrying him along?”
The special counsel’s report was sufficiently troubling that it should be grounds for Biden to leave the race, the ex-lawmaker said. (Biden has given no sign that he’s dropping out; at this point, Democrats would face a chaotic scramble to replace him if he did.)
“This is a great ‘exit stage right’ moment,” this person said. “But I just don’t think that hubris and ego will allow that to be.”
A White House official denied that the Hur report has brought about a change in strategy.
“We’ve always encouraged people who are actually around the president to rebut this false narrative Republicans are promoting by sharing their own experiences working for him,” the official said in a statement. “And if we’re doing that more, it’s only because the media is spending so much time on the gratuitous and false attacks made by Hur last week.”
‘He does grill you’
Eager to debunk the report last week, the White House hastily called a news conference in which the 81-year-old Biden insisted that “my memory has not gotten — my memory is fine.” With reporters shouting questions at him and Biden squinting into the lights, the event did little to stem the furor.
Since then, presidential appointees have scrambled to provide anecdotes showing him to be fully in charge.
Perhaps no official spends more time with Biden than his chief of staff, Jeff Zients. Press aides did not make him available for an interview. Instead, they released a statement from Zients that compared Biden favorably to much younger presidents — including Barack Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president.
“President Biden has gotten more done in three years than any other president in recent history,” Zients said. “How? No one works harder. No one asks tougher questions. No one is better at making decisions.”
Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to each of the last three Democratic presidents who now oversees the implementation of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, said the president’s advisers have grown accustomed to fielding detailed questions from him over minute policy details.
“Like a good student, you overprepare,” Sperling said of the homework that goes into a meeting with Biden. “When he does grill you, you’re happy you did.”
‘Just the reality’
One reason the Hur report may have resonated the way it did is that it validated a conclusion that voters have reached on their own.
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A Democratic congressman said that when he talks to his constituents about Biden, their comments focus on his age.
“They don’t ever bring up his accomplishments, which have been pretty incredible,” the lawmaker said. “All they talk to you about is his age. That’s just the reality.”
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When asked about Biden’s age, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who challenged Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, brought up policies enacted during Biden’s administration and urged the public to compare him to Donald Trump.
“I think that we’ve got to evaluate what’s happening right now by, one, what he has done, which is bring us out of this pandemic. [This is the] first time that we’re finally seeing negotiation on prescription drug prices, and focus on what matters to the American people and compare what he is doing to what we’ve got as the alternative on the Republican side, which is Donald Trump,” she said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Polling shows that age is among the biggest obstacles to Biden’s re-election and Republicans are already seizing on Hur’s conclusion that Biden is diminished. In a potential trial, the report stated, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
A consensus judgment of people who’ve met with Biden is that he looks and sounds old, with frailties evident to anyone. Perspectives differ when it comes to his capacities.
A Republican senator who spent time with Biden early in the term said they needed to suppress an instinct to take his arm when walking with him from one room to another inside the West Wing.
“He got up and walked very, very slowly — just creeping along,” recalled the senator, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss Biden’s fitness. “I almost reached out to grab his arm and I caught myself. That would have been rude.”
“He was perfectly lucid,” the senator added. “My impression was that [Biden] is a gentleman who at this stage in his life, likes to talk about the old days, sit around and tell stories.”
At the point when Biden offered to show the senator the White House movie theater, aides stepped in to end the visit, the lawmaker recalled.
(The White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, wrote a report last year that discussed Biden’s “stiffened gait,” attributing it to arthritis of the spinal joints. Biden is due to take another physical soon. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggested to reporters this week that O’Connor doesn’t believe a cognitive test is needed.)
One incumbent House Democrat questioned whether Biden is really running his own White House.
“It makes me worry there are other people who have an oversized influence on major decisions, specifically his advisers inside and outside the White House, and that somebody else could be calling the shots,” the lawmaker said.
But Klobuchar on Sunday defended Biden’s ability to handle a second presidential term, describing him as “focused.”
“I was on Air Force One with the president going from Washington, D.C., to Wisconsin for an infrastructure project. And I was with the president for over an hour and talked about so many things, domestic, international,” she said on “Meet the Press.” “He was focused. His recall was good. It was the same experience that my colleagues had who met with him for hours, Democrats and Republicans, about the Mideast only a few weeks ago.”
‘An old man that gets things done’
There's no “time machine” to make Biden seem more youthful, a White House adviser says. But the president can at the very least demonstrate he is a more lucid and trustworthy figure than his likely opponent, Trump, some of the president’s allies argue.
They’d like to see Biden make the case himself. In the podcast interview, Dingell said the president is being scripted to a fault.
“He’s being so managed that his compassion and his empathy” aren’t always breaking through, Dingell said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, another White House ally, said that Biden’s age is a potential asset if presented differently. Make the case that Biden installed a new Supreme Court justice when he was 79 and passed a landmark infrastructure bill at 78, Sharpton said.
The implication would be clear: Other presidents didn’t rack up as impressive a record even though they were decades younger.
“They should own it,” Sharpton said of the age issue.
Biden’s message should be: “I’m an old man that gets things done. Now, compare me with the old man I’m running against,” Sharpton said.
