Democratic heavyweights and congressional leaders began publicly questioning Joe Biden’s fitness on Tuesday, while 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 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 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 legitimate to ask whether this is just an episode or a lasting state,” said the very influential Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, on Joe Biden’s favorite channel, MSNBC.
– “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 voting intentions at the national level, 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 former Republican president, aged 78.
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,” insisted Karine Jean-Pierre 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.
