Connolly on Biden: ‘He has to be open to the fact that at 81, he is showing his age’

A second elected Virginia Democrat, Gerry Connolly, is now saying the quiet part out loud about Joe Biden.

“At the end of the day, we cannot afford to make a mistake about Donald Trump. We’ve got to put our best foot forward. And I’m hopeful that’s Joe Biden. I’m open to the fact that, sadly, that might not be,” Connolly said in an interview on CNN on Saturday.

So, now we’ve got Mark Warner trying to get together a group of Democratic senators to air their concerns in a meeting with Biden as early as Monday, and then Connolly, a Northern Virginia congressman who has a history with Biden, working as a staffer under Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 10 years, raising the red flags from the Virginia delegation.

“I’ve known him for 45 years. I know his family. I’ve been to his home. I wrote speeches for him and bills for him and amendments for him. I traveled with him. This is a man I revere, and I am not about to throw him overboard because of a bad experience,” Connolly said in the CNN interview.

The “bad experience” that we’re all focused on right now is the disastrous June 27 CNN debate, in which Biden looked to bring to life the caricature that Republicans have tried to sell the American public – dazed, confused, old, dangerously out of touch.

“I do believe that what happened at the debate was more than a bad night, and that’s why that image is so indelible in so many minds, and that’s why so much alarm has been raised about, what does that mean,” Connolly said, adding that “the burden is on (Biden) to prove, you know, yeah, I stumbled, it was terrible, I had an episode, but I’ve recovered from that.”

Which Biden hasn’t done, and you have to wonder, is it because he can’t? Much was made of the round of interviews that Biden submitted himself to this week, but the people who conducted the radio interviews with the president have since said that they were given a list of questions to use by the White House, and the other, on ABC, was pre-taped, and you have to wonder how differently it would have gone if it had been live.

“He has to be open to the fact that at 81, he is showing his age,” Connolly said. “Is that such an insurmountable handicap,  and I hope not, that he can’t win the election in November? That’s the real Democratic existential question that’s under underway right now in terms of trying to answer.”