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The extraordinary thing about this report in Axios yesterday is not the content of it – it is hardly a shock that a man in his eighties has mobility issues – but that it appears to have been published with the co-operation of the White House itself:
As voters express deep concerns about the 80-year-old president’s age and fitness for office, Biden’s team is taking extra steps to prevent him from stumbling in public — as he did in June, when he tripped over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy.
With a physical therapist, Biden has been doing exercises to improve his balance as far back as November 2021.
Since his stumble in June, he has been wearing tennis shoes more often to avoid slipping — and using the short stairs on Air Force One, entering the plane on a lower deck than before.
Some senior Democrats privately have been frustrated with Biden’s advance team for months, citing the sandbag incident and noting that the president often appears not to know which direction to go after he speaks at a podium.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Axios: “This isn’t new — it was proactively and transparently disclosed in a 2021 report from the president’s doctor and again this year.”
This week, a new Washington Post/ABC opinion poll showed President Biden trailing former President Trump by ten points – 52% to 42% – ahead of their apparently likely re-match a year from now. Most polling experts, including the people who conducted that poll, consider it a statistical outlier, and that the election is actually much closer than that. But it goes without saying that a candidate who needs help to stand up straight is probably not the strongest Democrat the party could nominate to face Donald Trump.
Or is he?
The biggest issue for the Biden team appears not to be Biden himself, but his Vice President, Kamala Harris, who is one of the very few American Politicians – alongside Trump, of course – who consistently polls as being less liked than he is. The additional complicating factor is that Harris is an African American woman.
Were Biden to stand aside, she would be his natural heir. The difficulty is that there have been many comments – on and off the record – from Democrats in recent months expressing something approaching certainty that Harris would not be able to win a national election. Notably, former speaker Nancy Pelosi even went so far as to decline to express confidence in Harris when asked to do so on a CNN interview just last month:
The other alternatives to Biden are all white – California Governor Gavin Newsome, or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer are the two most commonly mentioned. And therein lies the rub: How does the party which gets – and relies upon getting – 90% or more of the black vote turn around to those voters and tell them that they’ve just ditched the first black woman in line for the Presidency, in favour of a white bloke from California? Things could – and likely would – get very nasty indeed.
That is why, for now, Democrats are sticking with Biden. Just as the Republicans are convinced – for some reason – that Trump can’t possibly lose to Biden, so too are the Democrats convinced that even a wobbling Biden can beat Trump.
Meanwhile, over 70% of Americans consistently tell pollsters that they would prefer literally any other choice than Trump versus Biden, round two.
But if neither party blinks, that’s what they’re going to get. A contest between a man most Americans think is no longer physically able or mentally sharp enough to do the job on one hand, and a man most Americans think is either crazy or corrupt on the other hand.
No wonder both sides think they are certain to win. And most Americans, it seems, think that the country is certain to lose, either way.
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