Eight words and a verbal misstep put Biden's age back in focus for 2024

Appearing at a last-minute news conference Thursday evening, President Biden hoped to reassure the country of his mental acuity, hours after a special counsel report scathingly described him as a “well-meaning, older man with a poor memory.” ”

Instead, a visibly angry Biden made exactly the kind of verbal gaffe that has kept Democrats so nervous for months, wrongly calling Egypt's president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the “president of Mexico,” as he tried to imply speak. the latest developments in the war in Gaza.

The special counsel's report and the president's evening appearance once again placed Biden's advanced age, the deeply uncomfortable topic looming in his re-election bid, at the center of America's political conversation.

The 81-year-old president – ​​already the oldest in the country's history – has fought for years against the perception that he is a diminished figure. “My memory is fine,” he emphasized from the White House on Thursday.

Yet the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who had been investigating Mr. Biden's handling of classified documents, captured in a single cutting sentence the fears of Democrats who hold their breath whenever Mr. Biden appears in public , and the hopes of the Republicans. , especially former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. The Trump operation has made clear its intention to use Biden's stiffened gait and sometimes garbled speech to portray him as weak.

The Biden campaign has built its strategy around telling voters that the November election is a choice between the president, regardless of the public's misgivings about his age, and an opponent in Mr. Trump, 77, whom they portray as a threat to democracy and personal life. freedoms.

Democrats long ago cast their lot with Mr. Biden. With no serious alternative in the primaries, many in the party believe the country's future depends on the president's ability to convince voters that he is open to the job for another four years.

But for all of Trump's vulnerabilities — the Republican Party has been on a prolonged losing streak since he came to power — the more than $2 billion that the Biden campaign and his allies hope to raise and spend will not help the current president make you younger. .

And Thursday night's news conference was an example of the political dangers for Biden, whose missteps are magnified in part by the White House team's tight control over his media attention. His aides are so risk-averse that they even did a pre-Super Bowl interview this weekend in front of one of the nation's largest annual television audiences.

“Fair or not, you can't unring the bell,” said David Axelrod, Barack Obama's former strategist who has emerged as one of the Democratic Party's leading figures in warning about the way voters are approaching the age of Looking at Biden. Mr. Axelrod said the special counsel's report was so troubling for Democrats because it “goes to the heart of what is plaguing Biden politically now, which is a widespread fear that he is incapable of doing it.”

He added: “The most damaging things in politics are the things that confirm people's pre-existing suspicions, and those are the things that spread very quickly. It's a problem.”

The Biden campaign declined to comment.

Legally, Mr Hur's report cleared Mr Biden of criminal wrongdoing, announcing there was insufficient evidence to charge him. But Democrats seized on his charged language — Mr. Hur also invoked Mr. Biden's “diminished capabilities in old age” as something that would have been sympathetic to a jury — to ban the special counsel, once appointed by Trump , accusing him of partisan motives. .

For Republicans seeking to impeach Biden, the report and the president's angry response came as a gift after several days in which their own dysfunction in Congress dominated the news. The Republican National Committee quickly created an image with the report's eight most brutal words — “well-meaning, older man with a bad memory” — grafted onto the Biden campaign logo.

It doesn't matter that the special counsel declined to charge Mr. Biden, while Trump's own, more serious case over whether he mishandled classified documents remains part of the 91 felony charges he faces in four jurisdictions .

Still, Chris LaCivita, a top strategist for Mr. Trump, called the special counsel's description of Mr. Biden “scathing and defining.”

“The report confirms what Americans have seen on their TV screens in recent years – that an elderly man with a bad memory is leading America into a quagmire of wars, inflation disasters and lack of opportunity for taxpaying Americans,” Mr. LaCivita said. said.

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat close to Mr. Biden, predicted he would receive more calls from “people expressing concern.” But he said he would respond by talking about his direct experiences with Mr. Biden, which he said showed the president was “sharp, committed and purposeful.”

Still, Biden's confusion over Egypt and Mexico came on the heels of some slip-ups over the past week over dead European leaders. First, during a campaign swing in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996, with the country's current president, Emmanuel Macron. He then referred twice on Wednesday to a 2021 meeting with Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor who died in 2017, instead of Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.

Mr. Coons made a light-hearted comment about “the calls I get from startled Democrats saying, 'Oh my God, the president said X!' I'm thinking, “And the former president said Y!” If you asked Donald Trump who François Mitterrand was, he would look at you and ask, “What are you talking about?”

Mr. Trump has made his own series of verbal stumbles — most recently confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and earlier The leaders of Hungary and Turkey were mixed up — but polls show voters don't question his acumen in the same way they question Mr. Biden's. A NBC News poll released this week found that voters gave Mr. Trump a 16-point advantage on the question of who was more competent and effective — a 25-point swing since 2020, when Mr. Biden had a nine-point lead on that question.

Ms. Haley has argued that a new generation would better serve the country and both parties. “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate will win these elections!” she wrote in a fundraising email on Thursday.

Mr. Biden's aides privately emphasized that suggestions that his memory is fading would not hurt him because voters have already taken his age into account when considering whether to back him against Mr. Trump. Some of the president's allies on Thursday dusted off a playbook used by former presidents facing investigations: Attack the investigators for being motivated by partisan politics.

Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said Mr. Hur had no expertise to assess Mr. Biden's memory.

“The people writing this report are lawyers, not doctors,” Mr. Garcia said. “This person is a Republican who couldn't find any evidence. He's probably trying to hurt the president politically.”

For many Democrats, the episode was an unwanted echo of the handling of the 2016 election. James B. Comey, then the FBI director, held a press conference that summer to declare that he would not indict Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server, but he still denounced her judgment – ​​and then, months later, reopened. his research in the days before the election.

“This brings back the pre-Clinton-Trump 11 days for many of us,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist, who predicted Biden's troubles would blow over because the election is still far away. “The blessing for Biden is that he was old before this report, and he will be old after this report. We all knew he was old.”

The special counsel's report was surprisingly blunt. It described Mr. Biden's memory as “significantly impaired,” characterized an interview he recorded in 2017 as “painfully slow” and said Mr. Biden remembered some key dates of his vice presidency or “when his son Beau died.” didn't remember. ”

In a letter to the special counsel, Mr. Biden's lawyers called the numerous references to Mr. Biden's memory “unnecessary” as well as “prejudicial and inflammatory.” And Mr. Biden himself, with visible frustration, expressed disbelief at the idea that he did not know when his son had died: “How on earth does he dare bring that up?”

Rep. Daniel S. Goldman, a New York Democrat and former federal prosecutor, said the attention Biden's slip between Mexico and Egypt immediately attracted was a “perfect example of how the age issues are being completely exaggerated and blown out of proportion.”

It remains almost certain that Biden will be the Democratic nominee. He has easily won his party's early nominating contests, and the deadlines to qualify for the Democratic primaries have passed in about 80 percent of states and territories.

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Biden's only remaining Democratic primary challenger, has received little support so far. Mr. Phillips said the special counsel's description of Mr. Biden's memory showed that “the president is not in a position to continue serving as our commander in chief beyond January 2025.”

James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, said negative perceptions of Biden's age could not be dismissed as a distraction.

“The public doesn't view his age as — that's not a Fox News issue,” he said in an interview after the news conference. “It's not Taylor Swift manipulating something like the Super Bowl. So – I don't know how you get out of here.'

“The whole day,” he added, “confirmed an existing suspicion.”

Maggie Haberman reporting contributed.