For Democrats concerned about public perceptions of President Joe Biden’s age, today’s front-page Wall Street Journal report must’ve felt like a gut-punch. The headline read, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” The article added near the top:
The 81-year-old Biden is the oldest person to hold the presidency. … The White House and top aides said he remains a sharp and vigorous leader. Some who have worked with him, however, including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.
To bolster its thesis, the Journal appears to have relied on assessments from prominent GOP critics of the White House, including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and his immediate predecessor, former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
In other words, the Journal relied on Biden’s Republican foes — during an election season — to substantiate one of the Republican Party’s core criticisms of the Democratic incumbent.
Hmm.
Recent history also complicates matters. Politico reported late last year, for example, that while McCarthy mocked Biden in public, the then-speaker privately told allies “that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.”
As for Johnson, the current House speaker couldn’t be too concerned about Biden’s acuity — the president did, after all, recently convince the congressman to support military aid to Ukraine.
A variety of Democratic officials, meanwhile, have come forward this morning with public statements saying that they, too, spoke to the newspaper about Biden and his sharpness — their comments apparently challenged the central thesis of the piece — though their assessments were not included in the published article.
It’s important to emphasize for context that the same Journal article added:
Members of the Biden administration offered numerous examples of other situations that they said showed the president was sharp and engaged, including long hours in the Situation Room in April during and after Iran’s missile attack on Israel, and late nights on the phone with lawmakers from his White House residence.
This, however, was the 19th paragraph in the piece.
I’ve tried to keep an open mind on this issue. I’ve never spoken to the incumbent president directly — I’ve never even been in the same room as him — so I can’t speak to his perspicacity with first-hand experience.
That said, I know that (a) members of Congress from both parties who’ve interacted with him have praised his sharpness; (b) Biden’s recent work on Ukraine, border policies, and the Middle East suggest he’s tackling and implementing an expansive and ambitious agenda at the White House; (c) questions about Donald Trump’s mental stability seem far more salient right now; and (d) some GOP officials might want the public to believe the worst about Biden and his age, but I’m not inclined to take Kevin McCarthy’s and Mike Johnson’s word for it.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told me this morning, “Literally, the sole on-record critic in the entire story is Kevin McCarthy, whose interview contradicts his earlier public and private statements about finding the President sharp in their private meetings. … It’s a little surprising that The Wall Street Journal thought it was breaking news when congressional Republicans told them the same false claims they’ve spouted on Fox News for years, but it’s also telling that the only individuals willing to smear the President in this story are political opponents afraid to use their names — plus one proven liar.
“President Biden inherited an economy in freefall, fraying alliances, and a spiking violent crime rate, and he turned each around with his experience and judgment, delivering the strongest economic growth in the world, making NATO bigger than ever, and forcing violent crime to a near 50-year low,” Bates concluded.
