Elisabeth Franz/Reuters
President Joe Biden speaks at an Independence Day barbecue for active-duty U.S. military personnel and their families at the White House on July 4, 2024.
CNN
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President Joe Biden’s team has signaled a strategy of more casual, unscripted events and an accelerated public schedule to avoid the president drawing public attention from his poor debate performance.
But Biden now finds himself under intense scrutiny at a critical moment in his political future, with every verbal gaffe, deviation or moment of confusion being scrutinized and raising questions about whether his strategy is delivering the intended results.
Aides acknowledged that Biden’s one-on-one interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday is more important than ever, as a growing number of elected officials, Democratic donors and supporters express deep concerns about Biden’s age and his ability to serve a second term as president. Biden is scheduled to hold a news conference during the NATO summit next week.
On Friday morning, Biden’s reelection campaign announced an “aggressive travel schedule” this month that will see Biden, the vice president, the first lady and the second gentleman visit all battleground states, following urgings from allies to step up campaigning and messaging. The campaign said in the announcement that the president “is expected to engage in frequent improvisational actions this month, as he has done consistently throughout this campaign.”
But even before last Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN, Biden’s delivery had been choppy at times, and close observers of the president have noted that his speech and delivery have lost tempo, clarity and focus since taking office.
Biden made the verbal error during a radio interview recorded Wednesday and aired Thursday.
“As I said, I’m proud to be the first vice president, the first Black woman to work with a Black president, and to be associated with the first Black woman on the Supreme Court,” she said, speaking with “The Source’s” Andrea Lawful Sanders in Philadelphia.
Reached for comment Thursday night, a Biden campaign spokesman blasted the president’s criticism of the missteps as “unreasonable.”
“It was clear what President Biden meant when he spoke about his historic record of appointments to federal judges. This is not news and the media has crossed the line of absurdity here,” Biden campaign spokesman Amar Moosa said.
Biden made a similar claim in a separate radio interview recorded with a Wisconsin radio station on Wednesday, but he wasn’t wrong in his answer.
In both radio interviews, Biden answered questions at length about what he’s done to improve life for Black people in Pennsylvania and why this election matters, listing his accomplishments and filibustering in the way a seasoned politician would interrupt an interviewer.
The president sometimes starts speaking and then stops himself before or after he goes off on a tangent.
Biden’s opponent, former President Donald Trump, also had a history of verbal gaffes and was prone to lengthy digressions.
Addressing military families celebrating Independence Day on the White House South Lawn on Thursday, Biden briefly improvised audio read from a teleprompter, pausing after calling former President Donald Trump “one of my colleagues.”
“I was in a World War I cemetery in France, and a cemetery that one of our colleagues, a former president, didn’t want to go to. I probably shouldn’t say that. Either way, we have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America,” he said.
Biden also made a confusing reference to road closures during the presidential election: “When I was a senator, I thought the highways were always jammed. But now there’s no traffic. None. You get on the highway and there’s no traffic. So to shut me down, they say, ‘We’ve closed all the roads. Mr. President, if you don’t win, you’re going to lose all the votes.'”
Biden has been largely insulated by his team from signs of aging, with strategies that include short, tightly scripted events using a teleprompter, shorter strides aboard Air Force One and significantly reduced interactions with reporters compared to his immediate predecessor.
But some Democrats are increasingly convinced that the efforts were less about preventing gaffes or arbitrary deviations than about weeding out more worrying incidents that point to the president’s weakening and aging in recent months.
Close observers of the president have noted that as he gets older, Biden is no longer able to enunciate with the clarity and articulation he displayed during his last campaign and that he loses his train of thought more often.
“I know I’m not young anymore. I can’t walk as easily as I used to, I can’t talk as smoothly as I used to, I can’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, last Friday.
This story has been updated with additional reports.
CNN’s Phil Mattingly, Samantha Woldenberg and Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.
