The New York Times has sent the Democratic Party, the newspaper’s managing partner, two strong messages about President Joe Biden.
First, it reported on July 9, Sleepy Joe is too old for the job. Second, a majority of Democrats polled, particularly young ones, don’t want the 79-year-old president to run again.
Biden’s long train of gaffes and obvious physical infirmity and cognitive decline are the reasons, although the Times soft-pedaled what everyone knows: The man is too old to do the job, regardless of what aging experts and the physician on the White House payroll say.
Big Trip Too Taxing
“Biden is already more than a year older than Ronald Reagan was at the end of two terms,” the Times reported, and can’t handle extended foreign travel.
Tomorrow, the elderly president will leave for a four-day trip through the Middle East. But it “was initially tacked onto another journey last month to Europe, which would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek until it became clear to Mr. Biden’s team that such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president, or ‘crazy,’ as one official put it.”
Indeed, “his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party,” the Times observed:
It is, unsurprisingly, a sensitive topic in the West Wing. In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.
But they acknowledged Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans. His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.
Though an aging expert told the Times Biden is doing well now, the real worry is his winning a second term. “That’s the right question to be asking,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020. “You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get.”
The risks are rising for Biden now, the Times confessed, despite the clean bill of health from the White House physician. The risks are rising for the nation, too, given Biden’s border treason.
But, regardless of that fact, Biden is old, weak, and confused:
Mr. Biden’s public appearances have fueled that perception. His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, “John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from Virginia.
And he famously fell off a bike last month.
Honest Democrats discussed Biden’s cognitive decline during the campaign. He has not, obviously, improved since then.
Most Dems Polled: We Need a New Candidate
Thus did the Times report that Biden “is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign.”
Biden’s approval rating among those polled was just 33 percent.
Worse for Biden:
Only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.…
In a sign of deep vulnerability and of unease among what is supposed to be his political base, only 26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate him in 2024.…
The backlash against Mr. Biden and desire to move in a new direction were particularly acute among younger voters. In the survey, 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 said they would prefer a different presidential nominee.
One such voter told the Times she wants “younger blood” and that she’s “so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.”
H/T: American Thinker
